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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and family

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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and familyThe MSNBC anchor follows her Trump bestseller with a compelling memoir but her press criticism falls flat Katy Tur spent 500 days covering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, wrote a bestselling book called Unbelievable, and now hosts a show on MSNBC. She was planning to pitch a memoir about the 2020 election but changed her mind during the Covid pandemic, after a heavy package arrived from her mother.Because Our Fathers Lied review: Robert McNamara, Vietnam and a partial healingRead moreThe package contained a hard drive, which contained every minute of tape her parents, Bob Tur and Marika Gerrard, had taken as sole proprietors of the Los Angeles News Service. The drive contained all the footage shot from helicopters piloted by her father, Bob: from Madonna giving her parents the finger on the day she married Sean Penn to the famous chase of OJ Simpson as he sped through the streets of LA in a white Ford Bronco.As a child, Katy was often a passenger as her mother leaned far out of the cockpit to catch the best possible shot. Her daredevil father once got so close to a forest fire, he was cited for fanning its flames. Sometimes Katy felt the heat on her shins from a blaze barely 500ft below.That hard drive convinced Tur to switch subject. Her second book therefore tells a story she had spent her adult life avoiding: the story of her childhood. The switch was the right choice because even a particularly hard-fought campaign could not compete with the drama of her upbringing.Bob Tur was the kind of journalist who would do anything to get the story, “an oracle” to Katy. When the Northridge earthquake knocked out power to half of Los Angeles, her father used a forklift to rip open a hangar door so he could drag the chopper out and take off.He had such good sources in the fire department that he and his wife once scooped KABC-Los Angeles when its own 11pm anchor was shot outside the station. The Turs then sold the tape to KABC. A few hours later, Katy was born.Years later, she fondly recalled a childhood that “smelled like eucalyptus trees, the Pacific ocean and jet fuel”. But she was resolutely silent about all the ghastly things she experienced.Her father was the son of a gambler who would take him to the racetrack, give him the rent money to keep it from his own father, then beat his own son to get it back. Bob Tur’s “nose was broken by his father’s fist”, his “hand stabbed with his father’s fork”, his “face slashed by his father’s key”. He was “missing a piece of his ear because his father sliced it off”. In his mid-teens, Bob ran away.But according to Katy Tur, her father was unable to unlearn the worst lessons of his childhood and repeated the pattern of violence in his adult life, striking his wife, whipping Katy and her brother, punching holes in the living room walls.When Tur was covering the Boston Marathon bombing, she got the most startling call of her life. Her father told her he had “decided to become a woman. It’s why I’ve been so angry.”After the transition, Zoey Tur attacked Katy Tur for allegedly being transphobic. She insists she has always been supportive of such a courageous decision. But what she could not forgive was Zoey’s refusal to discuss or acknowledge the violence Bob Tur inflicted on his family, because the man who committed it no longer existed.Tur writes: “It felt like my dad was playing a get-out-of-gender-free card I didn’t know existed … I was dumbfounded by the idea that a person could change their gender … and think that in the process the deeds of the past would no longer be relevant.”It was “like a bank robber pleading not guilty on account of gender misalignment. But that’s how my father saw it.”“Bob Tur is dead,” Zoey Tur said. But, Katy Tur replied, “The stuff Bob Tur did isn’t dead.”The family story gives Katy Tur’s book its spine and its power. But interspersed with personal history are occasional attempts at press criticism which reveal uneven judgement.On the one hand, Tur acknowledges that her parents’ hugely successful focus on sensationalism is often blamed for the downfall of local TV news, and “some would say the downfall of national TV news too”.“They don’t dispute it,” she writes. “Neither do I.”But when she complains that too many people bemoan the decline of her profession in the decades since Walter Cronkite practiced it, she goes completely off the rails.Quoting a biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, another pundit of uneven judgement, she endorses the absurd idea that CBS Evening News covered the civil rights movement of the 1960s too sympathetically – citing as evidence the fact that bigoted southern affiliates derided their New York parent as the “Colored Broadcasting Station.”Tur also thinks it was wrong for the CBS Evening News to devote two thirds of its broadcast to Watergate two days before the 1972 election, when the New York Times and every major organization except the Washington Post was ignoring the scandal.The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquishRead moreShe disputes Cronkite’s 1968 description of Chicago police under Mayor Richard Daley as a “bunch of thugs”, a description delivered when the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff was accurately accusing Daley of using “Gestapo tactics” against leftwing protesters.Tur even questions Cronkite’s single finest moment, also in ’68, when he accurately identified Vietnam as a “stalemate” after the Tet offensive.Tur is a better than average network news correspondent. I admired her work when she covered Trump. But judgements like the ones she passes on Cronkite are the very reason so many long for the days when networks employed correspondents of the caliber of Roger Mudd, Richard Threlkeld, Charles Kuralt, Elie Abel, Bob Simon, Charles Collingwood, Ed Bradley, Edwin Newman, Jim Wooten and more – all of whom were vastly superior to their current counterparts.
      Rough Draft: Motherhood and Journalism in a World Gone Mad is published in the US by Atria/One Signal
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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts

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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts The former White House counselor’s memoir is tart, readable and thoroughly selective when it comes to inconvenient truthsKellyanne Conway joined Donald Trump’s orbit after Ted Cruz’s presidential bid collapsed and Paul Manafort wore out his welcome. The Trump White House was a snake pit. Like most Trump memoirs, Conway’s book revels in selective recall as well as settling scores. After all, this is the woman who coined the term “alternative facts”.A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more Read moreConway strafes Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Her disdain is unvarnished, her language tart. Her book? Readable.Conway labels Bannon a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor”. She dings his aesthetics and questions his stability. Confronted with the possibility Bannon might receive a presidential pardon, Conway says, she told him Trump didn’t owe him anything.“You were a leaker,” she remembers saying. “You were terrible to [Trump] in the press … You were the only source for at least two books riddled with lies.”He got the pardon anyway.Some who feel Conway’s sting are very close to home. She sticks a knife in her own husband, George, for trashing Trump and embarrassing her. Between the two men, Conway posits that Trump was the one who remained loyal. She may wish to reconsider. Her book has kindled Trump’s wrath.“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway writes, about the 2020 defeat Trump has refused to admit. But Trump denies she said any such thing.“If she had I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could go back to her crazy husband,” he “truthed” on Thursday on his own ersatz Twitter, Truth Social.But Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned. The Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s 2016 campaign exposé, captures Conway both badmouthing Trump’s chances and playing the sycophant.In 2019, Cliff Sims, once a junior White House staffer, framed things this way in his memoir, Team of Vipers: “Kellyanne stood in a class of own in terms of her machinations – I had to admire her sheer gall.”In Here’s the Deal, Kellyanne soft-pedals Green but is far less charitable to Sims. She rehashes his departure from the White House, dismisses him as a lightweight and gloats over Trump targeting him with a “brutal” takedown on Twitter.Left unsaid is that Sims played a significant role at the 2020 Republican convention, drafting speeches for two Trump children. And whatever his sins, he came to be re-embraced by senior Trump staff even after he challenged a Trump-induced non-disclosure agreement in court.On a matter of greater importance, Conway lauds Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative mega-donors who invested in Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct psychographic profiling company which was linked to Bannon.Rebekah Mercer allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection, via Parler. Conway omits such details. Not surprisingly, she also ignores Bob Mercer’s tax woes. In 2021, with his business partners, Mercer reportedly entered into a $7bn settlement with the IRS.Like many in Trumpworld, Conway hits Facebook for its role in the 2020 election. But she omits the nexus between Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant and Cambridge Analytica, in 2016 and beyond. The two businesses shared more than a passing acquaintance.Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested personal data from Facebook. Conway takes Bannon to task for profiting from his investment in Cambridge Analytica but stays mum about the Mercers’ ownership.In 2016, the Cruz campaign spent more than $5.8m on Cambridge Analytica services. That same year, the unseen hand of the company put it sticky fingers on the scales of Brexit. This past week, the attorney general for the District of Columbia launched a lawsuit against Facebook in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data breach.Here’s the Deal also contains its fair share of semi-veiled ethnic reductionism. Conway writes of how she “made her bones” – a term with mafia origins – in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Elsewhere, she deploys “clever”, “shrewd” and “calculating” to describe Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who is Jewish. At the same time, she shares a desire to keep things “classy”.Some realities cut too close to the bone. Despite acknowledging Trump’s loss in 2020, Conway is silent on his infamous post-election call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”The only thing missing was the president telling Raffensperger he was receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse. Unsurprisingly, Conway has few kind words for Biden. She recounts the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and rightly tags his administration for inflation. But she also blames the president for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout.This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for DemocratsRead moreHello, alternative facts. In February, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as smart and denigrated Nato. These days, Putin is under siege and Nato is the club to join. This somehow escapes Conway’s attention.As for Tehran, Axios reports that senior Israeli military officials now view Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal as having “brought Iran closer to a nuclear weapon and created a worse situation”. An attempt to placate Trump’s base had a cost.Conway remains in the arena. Here’s the Deal doubles as an audition for a campaign slot in 2024. In Trumpworld, few are ever permanently banished. Conway should ask Steve Bannon. He could tell her some things.
      Here’s the Deal is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justice

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      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justiceMarc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster’s brilliant book considers the history of communications technology in a racist society Nearly all the books I have read about the internet have deepened my fears about the net effect of social media on the health of our body politic. For example, I thought three facts from the congressman Ro Khanna’s recent book, Dignity in a Digital Age, were enough to scare anyone concerned about the future of democracy.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreKhanna reported that an internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”; he revealed that before 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles”; and he pointed to a United Nations report that Facebook played a “determining role” in events in Myanmar that led to the murder of at least 25,000 Rohingya Muslims and the displacement of 700,000 others.Seen and Unseen, a brilliant new book by Marc Lamont Hill, a Black professor, and Todd Brewster, a white journalist, certainly doesn’t ignore those dangers. But the authors’ focus is overwhelmingly on the positive effects of Twitter and Black Twitter, which they argue have democratized access to information, and the power of the smartphone to provide the incontrovertible video evidence needed to prosecute the murderers of men like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.The book is a brisk, smart, short history of the effects of new communication technologies, from the photographs of the 19th century to the movies and television of the 20th and the internet of our own time.It includes terrific mini-portraits of many of the heroes and several of the villains of the Black-and-white battle which has dominated so much of American history, including the great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who turns out to be the most photographed American of the 19th century, and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr, whose novel The Clansman was the basis for the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.There is a great section about the impact of The Birth of the Nation, which single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan and did more to rewrite the history of Reconstruction than any other book or movie. Its director, DW Griffith, was frank about wanting to give white southerners “a way of striking back”.“One could not find the sufferings of our family and our friends – the dreadful poverty and hardships during the war and for many years after – in the Yankee-written histories we read in school,” Griffith wrote. “From all this was born a burning determination to tell … our side of the story to the world.”As the authors note: “His movie did that spectacularly.”The book also reminds us that this was the first movie shown in the White House and the host, Woodrow Wilson, was a friend and Johns Hopkins classmate of Thomas Dixon Jr. Wilson, of course, was also the president who allowed the segregation of the federal government.But what makes this volume especially valuable is the authors’ capacity to see the good and the bad in almost everything.WEB Du Bois said The Birth of the Nation represented “the Negro” either “as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful but doddering idiot”. James Baldwin called it “an elaborate justification of mass murder”.And yet the film was so egregious it also had a tremendous positive effect – it “did more to advance the NAACP”, which had been founded six years earlier, “than anything else to that date. In essence it jump-started the movement for civil rights.” At that time, that term did not yet have any meaning.Du Bois and the NAACP hoped to hit back “in kind” with a movie called Lincoln’s Dream but were stymied by “the lack of enthusiasm” of white capital.In our own time, Hill and Brewster identify the unique power of the video of the murder of George Floyd, which “resonated with whites because the cruelty inflicted on him was so undeniable, so elemental … and so protracted (nine minutes 29 seconds) that it could be neither ignored nor dismissed”.For Black people of course it was much more personal: as they watched “the last breaths being squeezed from Floyd’s body, they could see themselves in his suffering; or an uncle, or a sister, or even a long-departed ancestor”.A beautiful mini-biography of James Baldwin includes many of his most pungent observations, including, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And, “To be a Negro in this country, and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time”.A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hateRead moreIt turns out that “one of the most frequently cited BLM counterpublic voices is Baldwin’s”. He is “the movement’s literary touchstone, conscience, and pinup” as well as its “most tweeted literary authority”.That is the most positive contribution of Twitter – and particularly Black Twitter – I have ever heard of.The authors write that Baldwin “was impatient with America because he saw it as trapped in its own history”, and wanted America to admit “that it owed its very existence to an ideology of white supremacy”.There was a time in my life when I considered that an exaggeration. But once you have acknowledged that ours is a nation that was literally founded on genocide and slavery, Baldwin’s judgment becomes an indisputable truth.
      Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice is published in the US by Atria Books
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      Trump promises to depress readers with big lie book: ‘I don’t think you’ll enjoy it’

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      Trump promises to depress readers with big lie book: ‘I don’t think you’ll enjoy it’Former president trumpets work in progress on his false claims about electoral fraud in 2020 Donald Trump says he is writing a book – which will “depress” readers – about his lie that electoral fraud caused his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.Former Trump official Kash Patel writes children’s book repeating false claim over Steele dossierRead moreSpeaking in Austin, Texas, on Saturday, Trump said: “This is the greatest hoax, heist. This is one of the greatest crimes in the history of our country. And sadly, the prosecutors don’t want to do anything about it.“This is the crime of the century. I’m actually writing a book about it called The Crime of the Century.“I don’t think you’ll enjoy it. You’ll be very depressed when you read it, but we want to have it down for historic reasons.”On Monday, Winning Team Publishing – an imprint co-founded by Donald Trump Jr which has put out a picture book about Trump’s presidency – announced the new book on Twitter.“NEW BOOK ALERT: CRIME OF THE CENTURY by President Donald J Trump!” the tweet shouted, promising details soon.The tweet linked to a website where copies of the picture book, Our Journey Together, were on sale for $74.99 (unsigned) and $229.99 (signed). A copy signed by Donald Trump Jr was priced at $199.99.Most presidents sign book deals. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, has published one volume of memoirs after netting more than $60m for his work and that of his wife, Michelle.Trump has published a number of books under his own name, using ghostwriters. But he left office in disgrace, having been impeached twice, the second time for inciting the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January 2021. There has been no memoirs deal.In June last year, Trump claimed to have “turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers” because he did “not want a deal right now”. But he added: “I’m writing like crazy anyway, however, and when the time comes, you’ll see the book of all books.”At the same time, citing staff protests at Simon & Schuster over a deal for Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, publishing insiders said no mainstream house would touch a Trump memoir.“It would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate,” Politico quoted one insider as saying. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?”‘Emperor has no clothes’: man who helped make Trump myth says facade has fallenRead moreBooks about Trump, his time in power and his refusal to admit defeat continue to be bestsellers. But Keith Urbahn, an agent behind many such books, told Politico: “It doesn’t matter what the upside on a Trump book deal is – the headaches the project would bring would far outweigh the potential in the eyes of a major publisher.“Any editor bold enough to acquire the Trump memoir is looking at a factchecking nightmare, an exodus of other authors and a staff uprising.”Winning Team Publishing has no such problems. It did face controversy, however, when the New York Times reported that Trump stopped his White House photographer using images which were then included in his own book.Our Journey Together was reported to have made $20m in just two months on sale.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansPolitics booksAutobiography and memoirnewsReuse this content More

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      A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more

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      A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more The ex-defense secretary’s memoir is scary and sobering – but don’t expect Republican leaders or voters to heed his warningMark Esper was Donald Trump’s second defense secretary. Like James Mattis, his predecessor, he fell from Trump’s grace. Six days after the 2020 election, the 45th president fired him, via Twitter. Unlike Mattis, Esper now delivers a damning tell-all.This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for DemocratsRead moreA Sacred Oath pulls no punches. It depicts Trump as unfit for office and a threat to democracy, a prisoner of wrath, impulse and appetite.Over 752 pages, Esper’s Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times are surgically precise in their score-settling. This is not just another book to be tossed on the pyre of Trump-alumni revenge porn. It is scary and sobering.Esper is a West Point graduate and Gulf war veteran. No one confuses him with Omarosa Manigault Newman, Cliff Simms or Chris Christie. Esper ignores Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway and barely mentions Melania Trump. He is complimentary toward Jared Kushner.In general, Esper disliked what he saw. Trump’s fidelity to process was close to nonexistent, his strategy “narrow and incomplete”, his “manner” coarse and divisive. The ends Trump “often sought rarely survived the ways and means he typically pursued to accomplish them”.The book captures Trump’s rage when advised that Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, lacked command authority over the active-duty and national guard troops Trump wanted to deploy against protesters in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.“‘You are losers!’ the president unloaded. ‘You are all fucking losers!’”In addition to Esper, Milley and William Barr, the attorney general, Trump also targeted Mike Pence.Esper writes: “He repeated the foul insults again, this time directing his venom at the vice-president as well, who sat quietly, stone-faced, in the chair at the far end of the semi-circle closest to the Rose Garden.“I never saw him yell at the vice-president before, so this really caught my attention.”Esper explains why he didn’t resign: “I didn’t think it was the right thing to do for our country.”His wife, Leah, framed it this way: “As your wife, please quit. As an American citizen, please stay.”The government attempted to censor A Sacred Oath, as it did The Room Where It Happened, a memoir by John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser. Fortunately, the powers that be buckled after Esper filed suit in federal court. Here and there, words are blacked out. The core of the story remains.At one point, Trump proposed launching “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”. The then-president said: “No one would know it was us.” He would simply deny responsibility. Esper looked at Trump. He was not joking.According to reports, the censors found this inflammatory. They did not, however, deny its veracity. Confronted with the story, Trump issued a “no comment”. Donald Trump Jr asked if his father’s scheme was “a bad thing”. Hunter Biden isn’t the only troublesome first son.Trump’s reliance on underlings who put their boss ahead of country distressed Esper too. Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, Robert O’Brien and Ric Grenell all receive attention. Little is good.Esper found their bellicosity grating. After a meeting with Trump’s national security council, Esper commented to Milley about its lack of military experience and eagerness for war with Iran.“We couldn’t help but note … the irony that only two persons in the room that had ever gone to war were the ones least willing to risk doing so now.”Esper offers a full-throated defense of Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Suleimani. The Iranian general had American blood on his hands and was planning an attack on US diplomats and military personnel.Esper also writes about the state of the union.“I was worried for our democracy,” he says. “I had seen many red flags, many warnings, and many inconsistencies. But now we seemed on the verge of crossing a dark red line.”In the summer of 2020, the unrest that followed the murder of Floyd transported Trump to a Stygian realm. In the run-up to the election, Esper feared Trump would seek to use the military to stay in office.Esper met Milley and Gen Daniel Hokanson, the general in charge of the national guard, in an attempt to avert that outcome.“The essence of democracy was free and fair elections, followed by the peaceful transition of power,” Esper writes.Ultimately, Trump did not rely on the military to negate election results – a path advocated by Mike Flynn, his first national security adviser. Instead, the drama played out slowly. By early January 2021, Milley was telling aides the US was facing a “Reichstag moment” as Trump preached “the gospel of the führer”.On 6 January, Trump and his minions unleashed the insurrection.“It was the worst attack on the Capitol since the war of 1812,” Esper writes. “And maybe the worst assault on our democracy since the civil war.”The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of historyRead moreYet Trump and Trumpism remain firmly in the ascendant. In Ohio, in a crucial Senate primary, Trump’s endorsement of JD Vance proved decisive. In Pennsylvania, his support for Mehmet Oz may prove vital too.Down in Georgia, Herschel Walker, Trump’s choice, is on a glide path to nomination. Walker’s run-ins with domestic violence and death threats pose no problem for the faithful. Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has bought in.Days ago, Esper told the New York Times Trump was “an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service”.Most Republicans remain unmoved. Esper is only an author. Trump spearheads a movement.
      A Sacred Oath is published in the US by William Morrow
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      The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring read of and for a post-Roe world

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      The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquish As the supreme court attacks women’s rights, Nell McShane Wulfhart’s story of ‘a workplace revolution at 30,000ft’ is timely In 1966, when America was still in the throes of the Mad Men era, when men were men and women were their secretaries, Martha Griffiths, one of a handful of women in Congress, wrote to the senior vice-president of United Airlines.‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knowsRead moreShe asked: “What are you running, Mr Mason, an airline or a whorehouse?”Charles M Mason had declared that a stewardess who lingered on the job for more than three years without finding a husband was “the wrong kind of girl”.Mason’s comment described not just the devalued status of stewardesses in the 1960s but the reality of most working women at the time. Mason’s “wrong kind of girl” (these “girls” were usually college graduates) was a woman who might not want marriage and children to be her only occupation, or might need to work for a living.As Nell McShane Wulfhart writes in her astonishing exposé of their long struggle for respect and equality, flight attendants were pimped out as sexual objects whose role was to serve, charm and entice male customers. TWA, United, Delta and other airlines argued that their bottom line depended on hiring young, beautiful women and firing them if they got married or pregnant, turned 32 or, God forbid, put on some pounds. Airlines were in the business of selling sex along with tickets, a very profitable Playboy Club in the skies.This largely under-chronicled aspect of recent women’s history is a valuable reminder of how far women have come. Those were the days when women couldn’t get credit cards or sign leases without their husband’s permission, sexual harassment and firing pregnant women was legal, only 3% of lawyers and 7% of doctors were women, and women earned 40% less than men for the same jobs. Women may have achieved the right to vote in 1920 but they hadn’t made many more strides towards equality until the second-wave feminist movement lit the fire in the 1970s.The recent bombshell draft opinion by the supreme court justice Samuel Alito, which would reverse 49 years of a woman’s right to control her body and life, only makes The Great Stewardess Rebellion a more relevant and urgent read. As American women stand on the precipice of revisiting their pre-1973 second-class citizenship, Wulfhart provides a stark reminder of how dark those days really were.In 1965, as many as a million women interviewed for 10,000 positions as “sky girls”. A stewardess’s globetrotting life trumped the few other options available: secretary, nurse, teacher. Those who made the cut were shipped to the “charm farm”, a stewardess boarding school where candidates were taught how to comply with strict hair, makeup, nails and clothing regulations. False eyelashes and girdles, yes. Glasses, no. Skills like mastering airplane safety came a distant second to physical appearance.As important as looking good was being svelte. If a stewardess stood 5ft 5 she could weigh 129lb or less, with three-pound overage once a month during menses. At the charm farm, “girls” close to the weight limit were pulled out of class for random weigh-ins. On the job, a scale was placed in the operations room, with stewardesses required to weigh in in front of their mostly male colleagues. Company doctors prescribed diet pills and many patients got hooked on Black Beauties. If a stewardess made the mistake of getting pregnant, she would have to quit, find a way to get an illegal abortion, or take sick leave to give birth in secret. At least six stewardesses who were fired after they turned 32 killed themselves.And then there were the “uniforms”. At first, the style was proper: hats, gloves, knee-length skirt suits and heels. But in the latter half of the 60s, the sex-kitten look prevailed. In 1968, TWA launched the “Foreign Accent” campaign. Each plane had its own theme and costume: a gold minidress for France, a toga for Italy, a ruffled white blouse for Olde England. American Airlines required tartan miniskirts, matching vests and raccoon fur caps.Braniff introduced the “Air Strip”, where stewardesses would slowly shed their Pucci-designed uniforms over the course of the flight. Madison Avenue ad copy boasted: “When she brings you dinner, she’ll be dressed this way … After dinner, on those long flights, she’ll slip into something a little more comfortable … the Air Strip is brought to you by Braniff International, who believes that even an airline hostess should look like a girl.”When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened, after the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, stewardesses were among its first customers. More than 100 gender discrimination complaints were filed by stewardesses in the EEOC’s first year and a half. The agency, set up primarily to battle race discrimination, did not take the stewardesses seriously at first. Nor did the unions, Congress or the courts, and it would be years until any semblance of real change could be wrenched out of the airlines.But when the women’s liberation movement erupted in 1970 it empowered stewardesses too. Mary Pat Laffey filed a class action discrimination suit against Northwest Airlines for violation of Title VII and the Equal Pay Act. Northwest appealed over and over but Laffey finally made history in 1984, when she won the largest monetary judgment in Title VII history: $63m in back pay.More importantly, the case forced other large corporations to settle EEOC cases and put affirmative action plans in place, paving the way for a workplace revolution. Laffey’s career lasted 42 years – enough time to witness the role of women in the workplace transform from servants and sexpots to partners and colleagues.Now we wait to see how far the supreme court will go to turn back the clock.
      The Great Stewardess Rebellion is published in the US by Doubleday
      Clara Bingham is the author of Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul
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      Trump sought strike on top Iran military figure for political reasons – Esper book

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      Trump sought strike on top Iran military figure for political reasons – Esper bookRobert O’Brien told top general shortly before 2020 election that Trump wanted to kill unnamed official, according to Esper memoir Shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, “stunned” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by saying the president wanted to kill a senior Iranian military officer operating outside the Islamic Republic.“This was a really bad idea with very big consequences,” Mark Esper, Trump’s second and last secretary of defense, writes in his new memoir, adding that Gen Mark Milley suspected O’Brien saw the strike purely in terms of Trump’s political interests.I warned national guard of possible coup, Trump defense secretary saysRead moreA Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Throughout the memoir, Esper presents himself as one of a group of aides who resisted bad or illegal ideas proposed by Trump or subordinates – such as the proposed strike on the Iranian officer.Among other such ideas that were discussed, Esper says, were sending “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”; sending 250,000 troops to the southern border; and dipping the decapitated head of a terrorist leader in pig’s blood as a warning to other Islamist militants.Trump made belligerence towards Tehran an important part of his administration and platform for re-election, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and regularly warning in bombastic terms of the cost of conflict with the US.He also ordered a drone strike on a top Iranian general blamed for attacks on US targets. In January 2020, Qassem Suleimani, the head of the elite Quds force, was killed in Baghdad.At a meeting in July 2020, Esper writes, O’Brien pushed for military action against Iran over its uranium enrichment – work that accelerated after Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal.Esper’s book is subject to occasional redactions. In this case, it says “O’Brien was pushing for” one blacked out word “and military action”. Esper says the vice-president, Mike Pence, “subtly lean[ed] in behind” O’Brien, who said: “The president has an appetite to do something.”Esper writes that Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, “jumped in to contradict this statement” and the moment passed.However, a month or so later, on 20 August, Esper says Milley told him O’Brien had called the evening before, to say “the president wanted to strike a senior military officer who was operating outside of Iran”.Esper writes: “Milley and I were aware of this person and the trouble he had been stirring in the region for some time. But why now? What was new? Was there an imminent threat? What about gathering the national security team to discuss this?“Milley said he was ‘stunned’ by the call, and he sensed that ‘O’Brien put the president up to this,’ trying to create news that would help Trump’s re-election.”Milley, Esper writes, told O’Brien he would discuss the request with Esper and others.“I couldn’t believe it,” Esper writes. “I had seen this movie before, where White House aides meet with the president, stir him up, and then serve up one of their ‘great ideas’. But this was a really bad idea with very big consequences. How come folks in the White House didn’t see this?”Fears that Trump might provoke war with Iran persisted throughout his presidency, stoked by reports of machinations among hawks on his staff. Such fears intensified as the 2020 election approached and Trump trailed Joe Biden in the polls.Esper book details Trump rage at Pence and proposal to hit Mexico with missilesRead moreIn September 2020, Trump tweeted: ““Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!”In the case of O’Brien’s suggested strike on the Iranian officer, Esper writes that he told Milley he would do nothing without a written order from Trump.“There was no way I was going to unilaterally take such an action,” he writes, “particularly one fraught with a range of legal, diplomatic, political and military implications, not to mention that it could plunge us into war with Iran.”He also says the O’Brien call to Milley in late August was “the last time something involving Iran seriously came up before the election”.TopicsBooksIranMiddle East and north AfricaDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS national securitynewsReuse this content More

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      I warned national guard of possible coup, Trump defense secretary says

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      I warned national guard of possible coup, Trump defense secretary saysMark Esper writes in new memoir of how worried he was that Trump would try to use US military to hold on to power A week before election day 2020, the US secretary of defense was so worried that Donald Trump would seek to involve the military in the election in an attempt to hold on to power, he told the general commanding the US national guard to notify him of any communication from anyone at all at the White House.Trump called top aides including Pence ‘losers’ as 2020 protests raged, book saysRead more“Without being too explicit,” Mark Esper writes in a new memoir, “my message was clear: the US military was not going to get involved in the election, no matter who directed it. I would intercede.”Such an intercession, Esper writes, would involve trying to persuade Trump not to use the military to hold on to power, then if necessary Esper would resign, appeal to Republicans in Congress and hold a press conference to appeal to the American people directly.Esper thought Trump might order actions such as seizing ballot boxes in key states. Ultimately, Trump did not attempt to use the military to influence the election, which he lost to Joe Biden. He did seek to overturn the result by other means.Esper was fired by Trump on 9 November 2020, six days after the election.He details the extraordinary steps he felt compelled to take before that in a new book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Esper devotes considerable space to his work with Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to stymie Trump’s attempts to use the military for political purposes, either in military strikes against Iran or in Syria – or even Mexico – or at home, by invoking the Insurrection Act against protesters for racial justice.Trump’s request that such protesters be shot in the legs, and Esper’s account of his resistance to it, has been reported elsewhere. The protests died down but Esper says the two most senior Pentagon figures remained concerned Trump could seek to use the military domestically, to tilt power his way.Esper describes a meeting at the Pentagon with Milley and the national guard chief, Gen Daniel Hokanson, on 30 October, “the last Friday before the election”.The “ostensible purpose of the meeting”, Esper says, given it was visible to anyone who could see his calendar, was an update on national guard military police units placed on alert to placate Trump during the protests for racial justice.But with regard to the election, Esper says, “this was a serious moment”.He says he told Gen Hokanson: “If at any point in the coming days – before, during or after the election – you get a call from anyone at the White House, take it, acknowledge the message, and call me immediately. The same rule applies if you hear of any TAGS [national guard state adjutant generals] or governors getting a similar call.”Esper says he also asked Hokanson “to figure out a discreet way to get this last part out, which he said he would”.Esper writes that as the only civilian between the president and the military, he was concerned the White House might “try to circumvent me to do something inappropriate” and “wanted to be ready for anything”.“The whole point of my game plan – the reason that I had taken so much crap over the last several months – was to be in this position, at this moment, to act. The essence of democracy was free and fair elections, followed by the peaceful transition of power.”Milley, he writes, told him he and the other joint chiefs would “resign if pressed to break their oath” and involve the military in the election. Esper says he did not want to allow the generals “to be put in such a compromising position, especially if a presidential order was legal but grossly wrong or inappropriate.“… If such an order came from the White House, my immediate recourse would be to demand a meeting with the president. I would want to hear and understand the directive straight from him, to offer alternative solutions if such were possible, and to voice my opposition face-to-face if he was unyielding. If I was unsuccessful I would be forced to resign on the spot in protest. But that wouldn’t be the end of the line for me.”Esper writes that he would have called senior Republicans on Capitol Hill to ask them to intercede with Trump, then staged a press conference “where I informed the country about all that had transpired and continued to unfold.Trump the hero for anti-abortion movement after bending supreme court his wayRead more“I would present my best case and make an appeal to the American people, their elected leaders in Congress, and the institutions of government to intervene. The point would be to buy time and put pressure on the president to stand down.”As Esper writes, election day, 3 November, “came and went without any incident involving the armed forces. Thank God.” He says he was relieved that though the contest was not called until the following weekend, Biden’s lead was clear.Esper also says he “never imagined” what came next: Trump’s attempt to overturn the election through lies about electoral fraud and coordination with Republicans in Congress and other rightwing groups and advisers, culminating on 6 January 2021 in the storming of the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.The attack on the Capitol has been linked to seven deaths and has led to more than 800 charges. But it failed to stop certification of Biden’s win. Having been fired after the election, Esper watched the attack on TV.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpUS militaryUS politicsnewsReuse this content More