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      Justice Breyer on Retirement and the Role of Politics at the Supreme Court

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      In an interview prompted by his new book, the 83-year-old leader of the court’s liberal wing said he is working on a decision about when to step down.WASHINGTON — Justice Stephen G. Breyer says he is struggling to decide when to retire from the Supreme Court and is taking account of a host of factors, including who will name his successor. “There are many things that go into a retirement decision,” he said.He recalled approvingly something Justice Antonin Scalia had told him.“He said, ‘I don’t want somebody appointed who will just reverse everything I’ve done for the last 25 years,’” Justice Breyer said during a wide-ranging interview on Thursday. “That will inevitably be in the psychology” of his decision, he said.“I don’t think I’m going to stay there till I die — hope not,” he said.Justice Breyer, 83, is the oldest member of the court, the senior member of its three-member liberal wing and the subject of an energetic campaign by liberals who want him to step down to ensure that President Biden can name his successor.The justice tried to sum up the factors that would go into his decision. “There are a lot of blurred things there, and there are many considerations,” he said. “They form a whole. I’ll make a decision.”He paused, then added: “I don’t like making decisions about myself.”The justice visited the Washington bureau of The New York Times to discuss his new book, “The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics,” scheduled to be published next month by Harvard University Press. It prompted questions about expanding the size of court, the so-called shadow docket and, inevitably, his retirement plans.The book explores the nature of the court’s authority, saying it is undermined by labeling justices as conservative or liberal. Drawing a distinction between law and politics, Justice Breyer wrote that not all splits on the court were predictable and that those that were could generally be explained by differences in judicial philosophy or interpretive methods.In the interview, he acknowledged that the politicians who had transformed confirmation hearings into partisan brawls held a different view, but he said the justices acted in good faith, often finding consensus and occasionally surprising the public in significant cases.“Didn’t one of the most conservative — quote — members join with the others in the gay rights case?” he asked in the interview, referring to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s majority opinion last year ruling that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination.Justice Breyer made the point more broadly in his new book. “My experience from more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that anyone taking the judicial oath takes it very much to heart,” he wrote. “A judge’s loyalty is to the rule of law, not the political party that helped to secure his or her appointment.”That may suggest that judges ought not consider the political party of the president under whom they retire, but Justice Breyer seemed to reject that position.He was asked about a remark from Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, in response to a question about whether it was “inappropriate for a justice to take into account the party or politics of the sitting president when deciding whether to step down from the court.”“No, it’s not inappropriate,” the former chief justice responded. “Deciding when to step down from the court is not a judicial act.”That sounded correct to Justice Breyer. “That’s true,” he said.Progressive groups and many Democrats were furious over Senate Republicans’ failure to give a hearing in 2016 to Judge Merrick B. Garland, President Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee. That anger was compounded by the rushed confirmation last fall of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald J. Trump’s third nominee, just weeks after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and weeks before Mr. Trump lost his bid for re-election.Liberals have pressed Mr. Biden to respond with what they say is corresponding hardball: expanding the number of seats on the court to overcome what is now a 6-to-3 conservative majority. Mr. Biden responded by creating a commission to study possible changes to the structure of the court, including enlarging it and imposing term limits on the justices.Justice Breyer said he was wary of efforts to increase the size of the court, saying it could erode public trust in it by sending the message that the court is at its core a political institution and result in a tit-for-tat race to the bottom.“Think twice, at least,” he said of the proposal. “If A can do it, B can do it. And what are you going to have when you have A and B doing it?”Such a judicial arms race, the justice said, could undercut public faith in the court and imperil the rule of law. “Nobody really knows, but there’s a risk, and how big a risk do you want to take?” he said.“Why do we care about the rule of law?” Justice Breyer added. “Because the law is one weapon — not the only weapon — but one weapon against tyranny, autocracy, irrationality.”Term limits were another matter, he said.“It would have to be a long term, because you don’t want the person there thinking of his next job,” he said.Term limits would also have a silver lining for justices deciding when to retire, he added. “It would make my life easier,” he said.Justice Breyer said the court should be deciding fewer emergency applications on its “shadow docket,” in which the justices often issue consequential rulings based on thin briefing and no oral arguments. Among recent examples were the ruling on Tuesday that the Biden administration could not immediately rescind a Trump-era immigration policy and a ruling issued a few hours after the interview striking down Mr. Biden’s eviction moratorium.In both, the three liberal justices were in dissent.Justice Breyer said the court should take its foot off the gas. “I can’t say never decide a shadow-docket thing,” he said. “Not never. But be careful. And I’ve said that in print. I’ll probably say it more.”Asked whether the court should supply reasoning when it makes such decisions, he said: “Correct. I agree with you. Correct.”He was in a characteristically expansive mood, but he was not eager to discuss retirement. Indeed, his publisher had circulated ground rules for the interview, saying he would not respond to questions about his plans. But he seemed at pains to make one thing clear: He is a realist.“I’ve said that there are a lot of considerations,” Justice Breyer said. “I don’t think any member of the court is living in Pluto or something.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Landslide,’ by Michael Wolff

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      LANDSLIDEThe Final Days of the Trump White HouseBy Michael WolffForty-five years ago, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” came out, it was a different world: There was no cable news, no internet and no social media, and the political establishment offered at least the illusion of being in control. The Watergate scandal, culminating in Richard Nixon’s resignation, presented a riveting series of public events — hearings, trials and so on — but that left it open to Woodward and Bernstein to tell the story of what had been going on behind the scenes.“Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House,” Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump’s presidency, after “Fire and Fury” and “Siege,” faces a different challenge in recounting Trump’s political demise (for now). Penetrating a buttoned-up White House was not the issue, because Trump ran his administration as a public performance. Nixon spoke calmly in public and ranted and cursed to his aides. Trump put his self-pity, revenge fantasies and paranoia on full display at his rallies and in his tweets. He was indiscreet, and he surrounded himself with other indiscreet people, whom he often motivated to become especially indiscreet by humiliating or firing them. How can one lend an element of revelation to an account of the crazy, terrifying weeks between Election Day 2020 and President Biden’s inauguration?Wolff’s method is essentially the same as in “The Final Days” and many other inside stories about highest-level politics: He uses lots of detailed off-the-record interviews with aides to produce a tale told in a third-person omniscient voice, without conventional journalistic attribution. I noticed only a time or two when he seemed to have put something that somebody had told him between quotation marks, with the person’s name attached. In books like this, the author adopts his sources’ perspective — narrowly, in the sense that they are shown behaving honorably, and broadly, in the sense that their overall take on events animates the story.In an epilogue, Wolff interviews Trump himself, at Mar-a-Lago. It’s an artfully drawn scene of the king in exile, but the former president doesn’t really say anything he hasn’t said many times before — and indeed elsewhere in the book Wolff wisely chooses to quote several of Trump’s public speeches at length, because nothing else quite as fully captures his (to use Wolff’s term) “derangement.” Wolff’s main sources seem to be a group of aides at a second or third level of celebrity, people who see themselves as “political professionals.” Administration staff members like Jason Miller (communications adviser), Mark Meadows (White House chief of staff), Matthew Morgan (counsel to the re-election campaign) and Marc Short (Mike Pence’s chief of staff) appear often in Wolff’s accounts of White House meetings, usually attempting unsuccessfully to impose a measure of order and sanity. It seems safe to assume that it’s their collective point of view, and that of others like them, that we’re getting in “Landslide.”Books like this usually burst out of the gate with a few newsmaking anecdotes, and Wolff does provide some of these. Trump believed that the Democratic Party’s elders would pull Biden, sure to lose, at the last minute, and replace him with a ticket of Andrew Cuomo and Michelle Obama. He toyed with the idea of using the pandemic as a pretext for indefinitely postponing the election. The most notorious line in his speech to the incipient mob on Jan. 6 — “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” — was an ad-lib, not in the text his staff had prepared. But the strength of “Landslide” comes less from these stories and more from a coherent argument that Wolff, in partnership with his sources, makes about how we should understand the period between Nov. 3 and Jan. 20. Most quickly produced books about political events don’t do that.Trump, in these pages, is self-obsessed, delusional and administratively incompetent. He has no interest in or understanding of the workings of government. He doesn’t read or listen to briefings. He spends vast amounts of time watching conservative television networks and chatting on the phone with cronies. The pandemic puts him at a special disadvantage; many of the people around him are either sick or afraid to come to work because that would entail complying with a regime of Covid noncompliance that Trump demands. If anybody tells him something he doesn’t want to hear, he marginalizes or fires that person and finds somebody else to listen to, who may or may not hold an official position. If Fox News becomes less than completely loyal, he’ll switch to Newsmax or One America News Network. He lives in a self-curated information environment that bears only a glancing relationship to reality.Before the belief that the election was stolen had taken full control of Trump’s mind, the idea was already there — because he chose to regard all forms of expanded access to voting, which tend to favor the Democrats, as stealing. He turned down entreaties from his staff to set up a Republican get-out-the-early-vote operation, just as he also turned down entreaties to endorse masking and social distancing during the height of the pandemic: off-brand. He was utterly disorganized, with endless firings and reshufflings of the key players. And during his second impeachment trial, Trump was represented by a comically incompetent, squabbling team of lawyers whom he had barely met.In the early hours of election night, when he was running well ahead of the pre-election polls, Trump decided he had won. After it became clear to everyone but him that he hadn’t, he empowered an alternate-reality team of advisers, headed by Rudy Giuliani and including people whom even Giuliani considered to be unacceptably out-there, like Sidney Powell, the freelancing lawyer, and Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow, and he embraced every available conspiracy theory and strategic fantasy about how he could change the result. To Trump, in Wolff’s telling, elections are roughly similar to the due dates for loans in his real-estate business — a place to start negotiating. Because he divides people into two categories, strong and weak, and because he has the deep cynicism of an unprincipled person, he chose to believe that he was not the first result-denying presidential candidate, only the first who was manly enough to challenge a typically corrupt outcome.Nobody holding official power in the White House or the Republican Party — in particular, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell — took Trump’s ravings seriously, so the horrifying events of Jan. 6 came as a surprise, probably even to Trump himself. The various rallies that day had been organized by independent right-wing political entrepreneurs with businesses to promote, not by the White House, and it wasn’t yet clear to most Republicans in Washington how fully Trump’s followers had accepted his insistence that the election had been stolen. Almost nobody in the White House was actively trying to persuade members of Congress to vote for the election challenges that were before them on Jan. 6.One obvious question all this raises is: If Trump was so unrelievedly awful, not to mention dangerous, why were Wolff’s sources working for him? “In insider political circles,” Wolff writes, “almost all politicians are seen as difficult and even damaged people, necessarily tolerated in some civics class inversion because they were elected.” Over time the realization dawned that Trump was in a specially appalling category. After that, “You took it and put up with it and tried to make the best of it, not in spite of everything, but because this was what you did; this was the job you had.” Or you thought you could help by “keeping it from being so much worse than it otherwise might be.” Or you persuaded yourself that you were serving a larger cause, as in the case of Marc Short: “He detested the president but saw a tight-lipped tolerance, however painful, as the way to use Trump’s popularity to realize the conservative grail of remaking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy.”More than all this, though, the quality of Trump’s that best explains what happened is that he commands a vast, enthusiastically loyal following that may represent as much as a quarter of the voting public, or even more, and a majority of the people who vote in Republican primaries. Nobody holding an appointed position has this, and very few elected officials do either. Wolff says the people around Trump believed he had “magical properties,” based on “a genius sense of how to satisfy the audience.” Everyone knew from firsthand observation how incompetent a chief executive he was: “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.” Therefore they assumed that his postelection lunacy would have no consequences, and that it was safe to avoid any public argument with the president that might arouse the Republican base. Essentially the only nefarious misdeed he was capable of pulling off was the one he did pull off, not entirely wittingly: the power to incite a violent, democracy-subverting mob of his devotees.Trump’s election, his term in office and the manner of his departure have reawakened a dormant debate about the essential health of the American political system. Are there too many barriers in the way of voting? Is the public misinformed? Do billionaires and other elites control the system? Do the Electoral College and the way congressional representation is apportioned overempower underpopulated rural areas? Wolff raises a more fundamental and frightening possibility: that the lesson of Trump is that in a democratic society, a malign and dangerous “crazy person,” especially one with a deep instinctive understanding of public opinion and the media, can become genuinely popular. Millions of Americans love Trump. As Wolff points out, after Jan. 6, his standing in the polls went up.This is not an abstract or theoretical concern. Wolff doesn’t make a direct prediction. But he leaves us with the strong impression that Trump will be running for president again in 2024. More

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      The Trump Books Are Coming. Cue the War of the Excerpts.

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      As a handful of authors compete to recount President Donald J. Trump’s last year in office, Twitter is strewn with vividly reported snapshots of a monumental year in American history.WASHINGTON — The capital was just beginning to quiet down for the summer when the buzz over the books began: Several seeking to explain the final year of Donald J. Trump’s presidency are landing so closely together over the next month that publishers have hastily changed publication days to avoid mid-scoop collisions.It’s enough to give an author nightmares.“I literally just wake up every day waiting to find out that someone else has jumped in front of us, and some book that I had no idea was coming is going to be announced,” Michael C. Bender, the author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” said in an interview.Really, it is not the most unfounded fear. Mr. Bender is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. “Frankly,” his first book, will be published on July 13. But he fast-tracked its publication, originally slated for August, after his publisher snooped on Amazon and uncovered the release dates of two other Trump-related books this summer: “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” by Michael Wolff, and “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters at The Washington Post.What has ensued is a war of excerpts among writers who are realizing their juiciest material may not hold. Twitter is now strewn with the most unsettling moments from Mr. Trump’s last year in office. Vividly reported snapshots of a monumental year in American history are proliferating like cicada shells on city pavement.Mr. Bender’s book, in excerpts shared with CNN, Vanity Fair, Axios, The Daily Mail and others, lays bare the leadership failures of Mr. Trump and his team. “Frankly” is full of expletive-laden interactions, including one particularly colorful exchange between Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Mr. Trump’s immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, over the protests that roiled the country last summer.The drip-drip of material is the extreme version of a commonplace promotion strategy, intended to get Mr. Bender, a lesser-known writer than some of his competitors, maximum publicity. But others seeking to claim their territory are aggressively following suit: Jonathan Karl of ABC News, whose book does not come out until later this year, published his own excerpt in recent days in The Atlantic.David Kuhn, a literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management, said the cascade of Trump books could end up “cannibalizing each other.”“There’s so many different planets that have to align for a book to truly break out,” he said.But the reporters are betting frequent promotion in a crowded market will improve their fortunes.An excerpt from Michael Wolff’s “Landslide,” which will be published on July 27, is the cover story for New York magazine, and outlines a scene in which Mr. Trump told his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that he “didn’t mean it literally” that his supporters should march to the Capitol on Jan. 6.And more details of Mr. Trump’s illness from the coronavirus were shared before the publication on Tuesday of “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” by Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, journalists for The Post.Mr. Trump has invited some of the authors of books on his presidency to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., more than once.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesIn their book, Mr. Paletta and Ms. Abutaleb present gripping evidence that Mr. Trump received a strong cocktail of drugs — “Trump’s doctors threw everything they could at the virus all at once,” they write. Robert R. Redfield, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had prayed that a serious bout with the coronavirus would change Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic. It did not.“Nightmare Scenario” is focused on the federal government’s handling of the coronavirus — Ms. Abutaleb and Mr. Paletta do not examine the events of Jan. 6, for instance, and they did not interview Mr. Trump. Still, so many reporters covering the same material at the same time made for a crowded reporting process.“We definitely would hear from sources that they had gotten calls from other reporters,” Mr. Paletta said in an interview. “That was quite intimidating for us.”Some of the more decorated reporters in Washington’s press corps have chosen silence as a strategy as they complete books scheduled to be published this year.Little is known about when Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post may publish their book on Mr. Trump’s final days, but the best guess from agents and authors alike is that it will be in September. (Neither author replied to requests for comment.)The list of summer releases does not include titles coming next year from reporters for The New York Times. Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is working on a definitive account of the Trump presidency with his wife, Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. Maggie Haberman, a former Trump White House reporter and current Washington correspondent for The Times, is also working on a book about Mr. Trump. Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, national political correspondents, are writing a book on the presidential race between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Jeremy Peters, who covers the Republican Party for The Times, is working on a book that assesses the G.O.P.’s attempts to wrangle Mr. Trump.Mark Leibovich, a political correspondent for The Times, is working on a sequel to “This Town,” a book on Washington culture, that will touch on the Trump era.At the center of the publishing frenzy is the subject himself. Aware of the barrage of books about his presidency and lacking a book deal that could give his grievances another formal platform, Mr. Trump has tried a charm offensive. He has invited some writers to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., more than once, serving them steak and seating them in his estate’s great room, where the visiting journalists can be part of the political pageant that happens there each night.Mr. Trump, who keenly understands his own place in the news media ecosystem, has turned down only a few interview requests, including one from Mr. Woodward. Mr. Woodward’s 2020 book, “Rage,” included several interviews with Mr. Trump, who told Mr. Woodward he had downplayed the threat of the coronavirus pandemic.But Mr. Trump has quizzed other visiting journalists on the people they are talking to, the questions they are going to ask and the stories they plan to tell about his presidency.“We were really surprised by how much time he spent talking to us,” Mr. Rucker said. “And by, frankly, how interested he was in our book and the subjects we were covering. He very much wanted to be a part of trying to shape the historical narrative of his presidency.”(Given Mr. Trump’s history with reading books — he does not read them — Mr. Rucker does not expect that the former president will provide a full review.)As Mr. Bender readied another excerpt for publication — this time detailing the long-running animosity that existed between Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s counselor, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — he said Tuesday evening that the breakneck pace with which he has written and promoted his book mirrored the hectic nature of four years on the Trump beat.“When this is all done I want to ask my publisher how this is supposed to work,” Mr. Bender said. “Nothing about this has felt normal. Which is kind of the experience of covering Donald Trump in a nutshell.” More

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      She Was Raped: The Enduring Trauma

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      More from our inbox:The Republican Attack on Our DemocracyThe Power of Physical Books  Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “I Am Breaking My Silence About the Baseball Player Who Raped Me,” by Kat O’Brien (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, June 20):Ms. O’Brien’s essay broke my heart. Why should she have to suffer for 18 years because a professional athlete raped her and she (probably completely accurately) believed that she had no recourse?How many more stories like this must we read before managers, executives, owners and players take seriously the fact that they create the culture that allows such behavior to happen? Were their wives, sisters or daughters working in professional sports, would they want them to be vulnerable to such a traumatizing experience?Professional sports, like the military, needs to take a hard look at what their indifference and even encouragement (showing porn films in the clubhouse!) are doing to women, maybe even the women they love.Edie LyckeSan Luis Obispo, Calif.To the Editor:Because Kat O’Brien opened up about her rape and the many ways it has constricted her life over the years, I feel finally able to include myself in the statistic that one in five women experience rape or attempted rape.I was lucky enough to escape the rape because of the intervention of another person. It was terrifying at the time, and I quit my summer job because I no longer felt safe coming home alone from work late at night. I lost weeks of income because of it. But, because I escaped with just a punch, a kick and broken glasses, I never thought of myself in terms of the rape statistics.I am sure that all women at various times in their lives fear for their physical safety when out in public or working at their job. What do we women have to do to get men, who seldom fear for their physical safety, to empathize with what it is like to live with that constant fear?Hazel LutzMinneapolisTo the Editor:Kat O’Brien’s piece on her rape and how it affected her entire life was incredibly powerful and brought me to tears. As a woman who came up in the advertising and publishing world in the ’80s and ’90s, I have my own stories and #MeToo moments that happened over and over again, and I applaud her for finally speaking her truth.I hope that coming out publicly about this horrible, life-changing experience will allow her to continue down the path of recovery.Lauren MichaelsVero Beach, Fla.To the Editor:Kat O’Brien’s disturbing account of being raped by a professional baseball player reminded me of an attempted rape when I was 15. I was tricked into being separated from the group at an after-dark beach party, and once out of sight, a schoolmate began to forcibly remove my clothes. I assured him that if he was trying to prove he was bigger and stronger than me, there was no contest, but he should keep in mind that my dad was the best shot in our county and “he knows where you live.”That jerk couldn’t wait to get back to the group, and I learned that the human brain responds faster to fear than anything else. I hope that other women will learn from my experience and conjure up an uncle in the police force or any other story that would instill fear in their attacker.Margaret CurtisAtlantaTo the Editor:Kat O’Brien describes an all-too-familiar story of violence against women followed by self-blame, shame and symptoms of PTSD. Oftentimes it is hard to seek psychological treatment, fearing that talking about what happened will only exacerbate the emotional pain. I hope that Ms. O’Brien’s courage in making public her victimization will help others reach out to friends and family and, if necessary, to seek psychological support.Larry S. SandbergNew YorkThe writer is a psychoanalyst.To the Editor:How many stories of rape or sexual harassment and their lifelong effects on the victims do we need to hear before we all say “it’s not your fault”? I don’t care if you were friendly. If you smiled. I don’t care if you had a few drinks. I don’t care if you looked sexy. If you wore a skirt that day. It’s not your fault.Joan SolotarNew YorkThe Republican Attack on Our DemocracyTo the Editor:The Republicans’ voter suppression, gerrymandering, reduction of voting places in urban minority areas, and baseless audits and challenges to the 2020 election results in Republican-led states are the greatest threat to our democracy since our country’s founding. And not a word of objection from most Republican leaders.I am reminded of a brief conversation recently with an immigrant repairman from Ukraine who has lived in the United States for many years and has his family here and relatives still in Ukraine. When asked if he fears for Ukraine these days, his response was swift: “No, I fear more for this country.”Ken GoldmanBeverly Hills, Calif.The Power of Physical BooksThe new location will offer new services, including food and drinks from a coffee bar.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How ‘Hamilton’ Brought a Bookstore Back to Life” (Arts pages, June 7):The laudable actions of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the director Thomas Kail, the producer Jeffrey Seller and the theater owner James Nederlander in saving the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan for future generations of theater lovers, professional and amateur, serves as an affirmation of the immutable fact that being in a room surrounded by physical books is a powerful experience that sometimes magically leads to creative inspiration.So long as humans remain a material species and not a digital one, no number of downloaded texts invisibly stored in a hard drive can ever do the same.M.C. LangChevy Chase, Md. More

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      ‘There Is a Tension There’: Publishers Draw Fire for Signing Trump Officials

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      Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pence and William Barr have book deals. That is raising new challenges for publishers trying to balance ideological lines with a desire to continue representing the political spectrum.Things were already strained at Simon & Schuster.After backing out of a deal with Senator Josh Hawley, a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, the company announced this month that it would publish two books by former Vice President Mike Pence. Dana Canedy, who joined Simon & Schuster as publisher last year, called Mr. Pence’s memoir “the definitive book on one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.” That’s when much of the staff erupted in protest.On Monday, editors and other employees at Simon & Schuster delivered a petition to management demanding an end to the deal, with signatures from more than 200 employees and 3,500 outside supporters, including Simon & Schuster authors such as Jesmyn Ward and Scott Westerfeld.Most were probably not aware that the company has also signed the former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, according to people familiar with the matter — a move that is sure to throw gas on the fire.In another era, book deals with former White House officials were viewed as prestigious and uncontroversial, and major publishers have long maintained that putting out books from across the political spectrum is not only good for business but an essential part of their mission. In today’s hyperpartisan environment, however, Simon & Schuster has become a test case for how publishers are trying to draw a line over who is acceptable to publish, and how firmly executives will hold in the face of criticism from their own authors and employees.Many publishers and editors have said privately that they would be reluctant to acquire a book by Mr. Trump because of the outcry that would ensue and the potential legal exposure they would face if Mr. Trump used a memoir to promote the false view that he won the 2020 election.But the reticence extends beyond Mr. Trump himself, and several publishers acknowledge that there are certain ideological lines that they won’t cross. Some said they wouldn’t acquire books by politicians or pundits who questioned the results of the presidential election. Another bright line is working with people who promoted the false narratives or conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump espoused.Certain literary agents representing Trump officials have adjusted their sales tactics. A few are avoiding large auctions in hopes of staving off a backlash until after a contract is signed, according to some publishing executives.“What I’m watching very closely is the succession of lines crossed,” said Thomas Spence, the president of Regnery, a conservative publisher. “People start to wonder: Whom else might they shut down?”Donald Rumsfeld, a defense secretary under George W. Bush, is among the former Republican officials whose books attracted little scrutiny in a different political era.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThose who work in the industry, which is concentrated in New York, tend to be left leaning in their politics, but publishing houses have long adhered to the principle of political neutrality when it comes to who they publish. After the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, major publishers signed deals with administration officials like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Bush himself, with little blowback. (An imprint of Penguin Random House published a book of portraits and stories about immigrants by Mr. Bush last week called “Out of Many, One.”)After the 2020 election, those ideals have been tested in unprecedented ways.“There is a tension there — on the one hand, I’ve always believed, and I still believe fervently, that we need to publish major voices that are at the center of the national conversation, whether we agree with them or not,” said Adrian Zackheim, the president and publisher of two Penguin Random House imprints, including Sentinel, which is geared toward conservative books. “On the other hand, we have to be leery of public figures who have come to be associated with blatant falsehoods.”At the same time, conservative publishers and some literary agents say there is enormous demand for books from voices on the right, particularly now that Republicans are out of power, and publishers are demonstrating that they are eager to work with politicians they regard as acceptable mainstream conservatives. Politico reported that William P. Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, sold a book about his role at the Justice Department. Sentinel acquired a book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose appointment by Mr. Trump last year caused an uproar on the left. Ms. Conway’s book will be published by Threshold, a Simon & Schuster imprint focused on conservative titles, though a person familiar with it said it would be more of a memoir than a standard political book.Simon & Schuster declined to comment.The company published several political blockbusters last year, including Mary L. Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” and John R. Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened.” This year has been more complicated.In January, Simon & Schuster dropped plans to release Mr. Hawley’s book following criticism of his efforts to overturn the election and accusations that he helped incite the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. This month, it said it would not distribute a title, published by Post Hill Press, a small publisher in Tennessee, by one of the police officers in the raid that killed Breonna Taylor.The petition drafted by Simon & Schuster staff, which circulated on social media last week, demanded the company cancel Mr. Pence’s books, not sign any more former Trump officials and end its distribution deal with Post Hill Press. Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster’s chief executive, wrote a letter to the company saying it wouldn’t take those actions.“We come to work each day to publish, not cancel,” Mr. Karp wrote, “which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives.”Staff members who organized the petition were not satisfied by his response. They sent a letter to Mr. Karp and Ms. Canedy on Monday along with the petition.“Let’s be clear: the First Amendment protects free speech from legal encroachment. It in no way calls for publishing companies to publish all viewpoints, much less those as dangerous as Mike Pence’s,” the letter said. “When S&S chose to sign Mike Pence, we broke the public’s trust in our editorial process, and blatantly contradicted previous public claims in support of Black and other lives made vulnerable by structural oppression.”Some publishing employees said the decision to sign Mr. Pence and other Trump officials was especially jarring as major publishers have taken pains to stress their commitment to diversity over the past year.“It feels like you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth,” said Stephanie Guerdan, an assistant editor at HarperCollins, who was speaking in her role as a shop steward at its union. “You want to make a safe space for your Black employees and your queer employees and put out your anti-Asian-discrimination statements. You can’t say the company supports these causes and then give money to people who have actively hurt those causes.”The reluctance among mainstream publishers to work with some conservatives has created an opportunity for smaller independent houses.“It’s one thing to be published by a group of people who are holding their nose,” Adam Bellow, who runs the conservative imprint Bombardier, “but it’s another thing to be published by a group of people who hate you.”Guerin Blask for The New York Times“The reaction of people on the right to the cancellation of political books is to double down, so we have lots of books to publish,” said Adam Bellow, who founded the Broadside imprint at HarperCollins and is now an executive editor at Bombardier, an imprint of Post Hill, which has published books by Representative Matt Gaetz and other prominent Republicans.Mr. Bellow added that some conservatives have grown wary of selling their books to mainstream publishing houses.“It’s a purge that’s becoming more of an exodus,” he said. “Many conservative authors are telling their agents they don’t want to be pitched to publishers who have canceled conservative books. It’s one thing to be published by a group of people who are holding their noses, but it’s another thing to be published by a group of people who hate you.”The highly charged atmosphere could lead to a realignment in the political publishing landscape, with the formation of a new literary niche that caters to voices on the far right.The D.C. public relations firm Athos started a literary agency and is representing some prominent conservatives. Co-founded by Alexei Woltornist, who worked in communications in the Department of Homeland Security under Mr. Trump, and Jonathan Bronitsky, who served as Mr. Barr’s chief speechwriter, Athos recently sold Bombardier a book by Scott Atlas, Mr. Trump’s former coronavirus adviser, about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic.Conservative publishers are also experimenting with direct-to-consumer sales with a new online bookstore, conservativereaders.com, that was created by Mr. Bellow and a small group of colleagues and investors. With a new online outlet, they are aiming to develop an alternative platform to traditional retailers and Amazon in the event that stores refuse to sell a controversial title.Some predict the appetite for political books will only continue to grow.“After the election, there was this big question mark over the future of the political book,” the literary agent Rafe Sagalyn said, “and I think we’re learning now that they’re very much in demand.” More

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      In Lady Bird Johnson’s Secret Diaries, a Despairing President and a Crucial Spouse

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhite House MemoIn Lady Bird Johnson’s Secret Diaries, a Despairing President and a Crucial SpouseA new book reveals how the former first lady not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade Lyndon B. Johnson to stay in office.Lady Bird Johnson in 1961. The first lady kept a diary, but she ordered that a part of it be kept secret for years after her death.Credit…Associated PressMarch 11, 2021Updated 9:51 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — He had been president for only two years, but that night in fall 1965 he had had enough. Lyndon B. Johnson had spiraled into depression, and from his hospital bed after gallbladder surgery, he talked of throwing it all away and retreating into seclusion back home in Texas.To a visiting Supreme Court justice, he dictated thoughts for a statement announcing he was indefinitely turning over his duties to Vice President Hubert Humphrey while recovering from fatigue. “I want to go to the ranch. I don’t want even Hubert to be able to call me,” he told his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. “They may demand that I resign. They may even want to impeach me.”Eventually, Mrs. Johnson coaxed him through that period of doubt and despair, enabling him to complete the final three years of his term. The episode was hidden from the public, and although Mrs. Johnson documented it in her diary, she ordered the entry kept secret for years after her death. But a new book reveals the full scope of those once-shrouded diaries as never before, shedding fresh light on the former first lady and her partnership with the 36th president.The diaries reveal how central Mrs. Johnson was to her husband’s presidency. She not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade him to stay in office at critical junctures, advised him on how to use the office to achieve their mutual goals, guided him during the most arduous moments and helped chart his decision to give up power years later.While she is remembered largely as a political wife and businesswoman with impeccable manners, an easy laugh, a soft Texas lilt and a quintessentially first-lady-like White House portfolio promoting “beautification” efforts, the diaries make clear that Mrs. Johnson behind the scenes was also a canny political operator and shrewd judge of people.“The pre-existing image is one of two-dimensionality and stiff-upper-lipness and not a hair out of place,” said Julia Sweig, who spent five years researching the diaries for the biography “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,” set to be published on Tuesday. “But when you get into this material, you see what a rounded, multidimensional human being she is.”Mrs. Johnson began her diary shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy vaulted her husband to the presidency in November 1963, and she dutifully kept it up through the end of their time in the White House in January 1969. She released carefully edited excerpts in a 1970 book titled “A White House Diary,” but some portions remained sealed until long after her death in 2007 at age 94.Ms. Sweig, a longtime Washington scholar, learned about the diaries from a friend and became captivated when she visited the Johnson presidential museum in Austin, Texas, and stepped into an exhibit that featured Mrs. Johnson’s voice from the taped diaries describing the day of the Kennedy assassination. The first lady’s voice was activated by a motion detector, so Ms. Sweig repeatedly stepped in and out of the museum room to hear the diary entry over and over.She then embarked on a project examining all 123 hours of tapes and transcripts, the last of which were not released until 2017, combined with other research to produce the biography and an accompanying eight-part podcast, “In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson,” produced by ABC News, that features Mrs. Johnson’s voice narrating her time in the White House. (The fourth episode airs on Monday.)“It’s very unusual to find such an unexcavated and contemporary record of such a recent period of history that we thought we knew and understood about a presidency that we thought we knew and understood,” Ms. Sweig said.President Lyndon B. Johnson with Mrs. Johnson in 1963. She advised her husband through the civil rights movement, the enactment of the Great Society program and the Vietnam War.Credit…Associated PressJohnson scholars said Ms. Sweig’s examination of the diaries flesh out the popular understanding of that era. “She fills out this picture now that we have of the Johnson presidency,” said the historian Robert Dallek, who spent 14 years researching two books on Lyndon Johnson.Born Claudia Alta Taylor in a small East Texas town, Mrs. Johnson was a force in her husband’s political career from Congress to the White House. She advised him through the civil rights movement, the enactment of the Great Society program and the Vietnam War, and she helped figure out how to handle the arrest of a close aide and used her beautification program to promote an environmental and social justice agenda.Perhaps most consequentially, she steered her husband through his inner turmoil. As early as May 1964, six months after taking office, he contemplated his departure by not running for election in his own right that fall. Mrs. Johnson drew up a seven-page strategy memo as well as a draft letter forgoing election to show him what it would look like. But she told her diary, “I hope he won’t use it,” and encouraged him to stay the course, which he did.At the same time, her strategy memo presciently outlined his eventual course, suggesting he run for election but serve just one full term, then announce in March 1968 that he would not run again.There were moments when he almost upended the plan, as in October 1965, after his gallbladder surgery. There was no particular precipitating event, and he was arguably at the height of his presidency, having passed major civil rights legislation while not yet mired in the worst of the Vietnam War. Indeed, he signed 13 domestic policy bills from his bed during a two-week convalescence at Bethesda Naval Hospital.Yet for whatever reason, he became overwhelmed with the stress of the job one night as Abe Fortas, the longtime ally he had just appointed to the Supreme Court, sat at his bedside. The beleaguered president told his wife and the justice that he could handle “not one more piece of paper, not one more problem,” and he dictated thoughts about how he could escape the burdens of the presidency to Fortas, who wrote them out longhand.“He was like a man on whom an avalanche had suddenly fallen,” Mrs. Johnson recorded. She knew his drastic mood swings better than anyone but had missed this one coming. “So here is the black beast of depression back in our lives,” she told her diary in a section she marked “close for 10 years, and review then.”The diary entry reinforced how important she was to keeping her husband centered. “L.B.J. often let his demons roam with her, knowing that she would quietly ward them off by appealing to his better angels,” said Mark K. Updegrove, the president of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation and the author of “Indomitable Will” about the Johnson presidency. “He used her not only as a sounding board but revealed his subconscious to her, including expressing his darkest thoughts that he was trying to work through. She helped to work them out — or exorcise them.”Mrs. Johnson helped exorcise them that fall, but by 1968, she, too, thought it might be time for him to move on. He had a secret ending drafted for his State of the Union address in January announcing that he would not run for re-election, but he was uncertain whether he would deliver it. Before he left for the Capitol, Mrs. Johnson noticed that he had left the secret draft behind, so she rushed over to tuck it in his suit pocket.She then watched from the House gallery as he delivered his speech, not knowing herself whether he would use the secret ending or not. He did not. But then, when it came time for an address to the nation announcing a de-escalation in bombing North Vietnam, he finally issued the surprise declaration. That was in March 1968 — exactly according to the timetable Mrs. Johnson had outlined four years earlier.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Book Review: ‘Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to ReadNew Books to Watch For This Month25 Book Review GreatsNew in PaperbackListen: The Book Review PodcastAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The TimesA Closely Reported Look at Joe Biden’s ‘Lucky’ Path to the White HouseMarch 2, 2021, 11:40 a.m. ETCredit….AmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.About midway through “Lucky,” the journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes describe the concerns that some Democrats had last summer about Joe Biden, by then the party’s presidential nominee: How could they hope to win with “an agenda and a person so bland it made cardboard taste flavorful”?Considering that this agenda and person constitute a driving narrative force in “Lucky,” the line reads like a coded admission that the authors — tasked with parsing the flavor of cardboard over the course of more than 400 pages — had their work cut out for them.Allen and Parnes have published two previous books, both of them about Hillary Clinton, including the best-selling “Shattered,” which recounted how the Clinton campaign bungled what should have been a winnable election against Donald Trump in 2016 by succumbing to incompetence and infighting.Jonathan AllenCredit…Stuart Hovell“Shattered” arrived in the spring of 2017, when bewildered Democrats were still asking what happened. “Lucky” arrives at a completely different moment. A string of tell-alls about Trump’s White House have recounted a level of backbiting and chaos that made the inner workings of the Clinton campaign look like a Swiss timepiece by comparison. Within the last year alone, a pandemic has killed more than 500,000 Americans and the White House demanded crackdowns on protests against police brutality. Less than two months have passed since Trump supporters invaded the Capitol. I’m guessing that a number of readers felt so inundated by the unrelenting news cycle of the Trump era that their receptors for campaign-trail intrigues have been worn down to calloused nubs.It’s understandable that Allen and Parnes would do everything they could to amp up the drama — not an easy feat, given the cardboard. With their new book, they promise to explain “how Joe Biden barely won the presidency.” Biden’s margin of victory — 7 million votes, or 4.5 percent — was considerable by modern American standards. But the quirks of the American system, including the gauntlet of the primaries and the peculiarities of the Electoral College, meant that there were a number of moments when Biden’s chances were nearly sunk — moments that “Lucky” recounts in full.The book reminds us that back in April 2019, when Biden announced he was running, he wasn’t an obvious favorite in a crowded field of Democratic aspirants. (“Lucky” reports that Clinton was so unimpressed with everyone’s prospects that she briefly considered running … again.) Biden had already sought and failed to secure the nomination twice, in 1988 and 2008. He was 76 years old — not even a boomer like Trump, previously the oldest president sworn into a first term, but a member of the Silent Generation. Biden had always rambled and repeated himself, and during the early days of his campaign he was rambling and repeating himself more than ever.Although he brandished his record as a consensus-builder in the Senate, he had a habit of hurling insults at potential voters. At one town hall, as if he were intent on reminding the audience of both his age and his temper, Biden called a young woman “a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”But Joe Biden was always a favorite of Joe Biden. One of the themes in this book is how unwaveringly confident he was in his chances — “a great strength and a weakness that could leave him sounding a little self-delusional,” Allen and Parnes write. (Barack Obama, in his recent memoir, describes him as someone who “wasn’t always self-aware.”) Biden believed he could win even during the dark days of the early Democratic primaries more than a year ago, when his campaign was running out of money and he placed abysmally in Iowa and New Hampshire before coming in a distant second to Bernie Sanders in Nevada.Amie ParnesCredit…Chip SomodevillaSure, Biden realized that some progressive voters might take issue with parts of his long Senate record, including his adamant opposition to busing in the 1970s, his treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings and his authorship of the 1994 crime bill. But Biden was banking on his likability, Allen and Parnes say. That, and the hunch that an American populace exhausted by an erratic Trump just wanted someone experienced, steady and familiar at the wheel.He also benefited from a Democratic establishment that was so averse to Sanders that it closed ranks around Biden as other centrist contenders — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar — dropped out of the race. Biden, with his “bland message and blank agenda,” was “not what most Democratic voters had envisioned as a Trumpslayer,” Allen and Parnes write. But a hard-won endorsement from Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, a central figure in the Congressional Black Caucus, helped turn Biden’s fortunes around. “Lucky” portrays the Biden campaign as stuck in traffic until Super Tuesday, when it started hitting a string of green lights.This luck persisted through the pandemic, which revealed Biden’s ability to empathize with a grieving public while showcasing President Trump’s determination to do the opposite. As Anita Dunn, an adviser to the Biden campaign, put it: “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him.”It’s a ghoulish sentiment, the kind of candid cynicism that one expects from a political ticktock like this. But it also highlights something else. Amid all the fund-raising, the polling, the minute movements of the horse race enumerated in this book, people were dying. Americans were suffering. California was burning. The world, in other words, was happening — all while enormous political energy and billions of dollars got sucked into the maw of endless campaigning.A future researcher will undoubtedly find it useful to have a page and a half of exacting detail about what everyone was thinking when a fly landed on Mike Pence’s head during the vice-presidential debate, or to learn how Biden’s people insisted on watering down one of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s jokes during the Democratic convention. Given how the American political system currently works, the granular politicking ably recounted in “Lucky” is a necessity — but what becomes unintentionally clear is how wasteful so much of it is.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Should Black Northerners Move Back to the South?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to ReadNew Books to Watch For This Month25 Book Review GreatsNew in PaperbackListen: The Book Review PodcastAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionShould Black Northerners Move Back to the South?Campaigning in GeorgiaCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.March 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETTHE DEVIL YOU KNOWA Black Power ManifestoBy Charles M. BlowLeading up to the 2020 presidential election, Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown and other grass-roots activists successfully registered an unprecedented number of Black voters in Georgia who had been stymied in the past by voter-suppression tactics. Their work brought key victories to Democratic candidates in the state and demonstrated the political power of Southern Black women.Georgia’s recent presidential and Senate elections are relevant to the argument of the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.” There are two Black Americas, he says. One is the world of those who remained in the postslavery South. The other is inhabited by those who fled the South for refuge in what he terms “destination cities” across the North and West during the Great Migration. But these cities are now broken, according to Blow, and the Great Migration has been a “stinging failure.” Blow, a son of Louisiana who recently moved back south — to Atlanta — says Black Americans must bridge this divide.In what he believes would be “the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country,” Blow calls for African-Americans to reverse-migrate south, to collectively dismantle white supremacy by using their ancestral homeland as a political base. He imagines a New South where “our trauma history is not our total history.” That Black people have been returning south for at least the past 40 years, he adds, demonstrates that there is fertile ground for his idea in the region, intellectually and materially.His is a familiar argument, revitalized by the South’s recent political developments. A genesis for Blow’s Black power proposition could have been the Black Belt nation thesis, proposed by Black Communists in the 1920s, or the agenda of the Republic of New Afrika in the 1960s. But Blow instead builds upon the political thought of the freethinking white hippies who moved to Vermont in the early 1970s with the intent of transforming the state’s conservative electoral politics. They succeeded, he says; young Black people today should follow their blueprint.Seeing Georgia flip blue in the 2020 election became Blow’s “proof of concept,” and for him, one thing now seems clear: The path to lasting Black power is through the vote. Forming a “contiguous band” of Black voters across the South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, in particular — would “upend America’s political calculus and exponentially increase” Black citizens’ influence in American politics. The weakness in Blow’s plan is that it requires faith in a political system that has consistently failed Black Americans at nearly every turn.For Blow, however, the reality that Black Northerners have no recourse but to leave is a painful truth that crystallized for him one night in 2015 when he learned that his son, a student at Yale, had been stopped at gunpoint by a university police officer. Stories like this fuel the book’s searing account of police violence, systemic racial disparities and social unrest in cities like New York, Minneapolis and Portland. This is where Blow is at his best.As a historian, I wish he had spent more time exploring the nuances of the Black migration framework the book hinges upon. Blow’s claim that the Great Migration “hit the South like a bomb,” causing an intellectual and cultural brain drain that stunted its growth, rings hollow. It obscures the truth that the region was an incubator of radical political activism — often led by its most disenfranchised citizens — during the Great Migration and beyond. The New South to which Blow is now beckoning people to return was created largely by the Black visionaries and community builders who remained in the rural and urban South.A strength of “The Devil You Know” is its affirmation of Black Americans as a formidable political bloc with whom the nation must reckon. The book is a helpful introduction for those seeking to make sense of fractious political debates about race and voting rights in the South, and the broken promises of American democracy.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More