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      Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too

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      Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”.Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a product of the Ivy League: the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard business school. He also did stints in the Obama administration and at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and United Healthcare.His book reads like Covid-porn for blue America. Unfortunately, he does not reflect on how the US reached this place.The saga of Albion’s Seed – English Protestants who slaughtered each other in the old country, overthrew the crown in a new land then waged a second civil war – does not figure in Slavitt’s calculus. Said differently, if kin can repeatedly raise arms against kin, the social fabric can never be taken for granted – especially not as demographics convulse. E pluribus unum has limitations.Slavitt sees Trump’s cruelty at the southern border but fails to acknowledge the grievances of those in flyover country. Brexit and Trump were not one-offs. They were inextricably related. Displacement exacts a price.Slavitt’s book is subtitled “The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response”. He lauds pandemic responses in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand and criticizes Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, governors of Texas and Florida.But he ignores the fact that cases and mortality rates in those two states were lower than in New York and New Jersey – states called home by coastal elites.To his credit, Slavitt does take to task Bill de Blasio, that hapless and tin-eared mayor, for urging New Yorkers to “go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants” as the pandemic took root.“The impact of New York’s delay was significant,” Slavitt writes.Similarly, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s performative Republican governor, is derided for her “freedom-first” strategy. But unlike De Blasio she remains popular in her state and her party. A DeSantis-Noem Republican ticket in 2024 is not out of the question. In the eyes of voters, Noem did something right – much like Andrew Cuomo in New York, now beset by allegations of sexual misconduct but apparently on the verge of dodging a political bullet.On the other hand, the New York Times reports that even in east Asia and the south Pacific, supposed world leaders in containing the coronavirus, the fight is not yet won. Variants and their dangers loom. Vaccinations lag.To quote the Times, “people are fed up” and asking: “Why are we behind and when, for the love of all things good and great, will the pandemic routine finally come to an end?”Patience is never in limitless supply. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Slavitt makes insufficient allowance for this very human quirk.Trump was callous and mendacious but he grasped what made folks tick. Despite Slavitt’s vilification of big pharma, in those countries that possessed sufficient capital and foresight, vaccine manufacturers came through. Markets can work, even if they result in asymmetries.As expected, Preventable catalogs Trump’s failings in granular detail: his false promises of Covid quickly disappearing, his embrace of medical quackery, his rejection of testing as a crucial weapon. Slavitt also reminds readers that Trump chucked his predecessor’s pandemic response playbook and gutted the supply of personal protective equipment, just for the sake of blotting out the past.Politicians are self-centered. Trump more so than others. According to Slavitt, he saw himself as the smartest person in the room and expected to be flattered accordingly. One way to win his attention was to compliment his parenting skills. But being the owner of a debt-laden company forced to pay for golf course upkeep with no one on the greens may have injected additional anxiety. The public was expected to feel Trump’s pain.Slavitt also describes Trump’s difficulty in coming to grips with the possibility of the pandemic costing him the election, and his decision to offload to the states the mission of combating Covid. The White House became the backdrop for a reality show while the Confederate flag emerged as a symbol of pro-Trump, “liberate the state” sentiment.Jared Kushner told Slavitt: “We’re going to put testing back to the states.” The White House “can’t be responsible”, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser explained. “Some [governors] don’t want to succeed. Bad incentives to keep blaming us.”As an administration insider told the Guardian in April 2020, Trump was “killing his own supporters”.And yet, not surprisingly, Slavitt struggles with the reality that Democratic nay-saying almost lost Biden the White House and Nancy Pelosi the speaker’s gavel. Voters yearned for hope and wanted to know their sacrifice mattered.Being told “we are in this together” when “we” are manifestly not is more than a problem with messaging. For example, Slavitt omits mention of Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and his infamous dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant in November as Covid cases mounted. On being found out, Newsom acknowledged: “We’re all human. We all fall short sometimes.” Whatever.Slavitt does upbraid the Fox News host Tucker Carlson for downplaying the dangers of Covid and recounts the inane pronouncements of Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded New York University law school professor, to a similar end. Slavitt calls Epstein “disconnected from reality and remarkably self-assured”.This week, the US death toll passed 600,000. The vaccine works only on the living. The world has experienced more deaths halfway through 2021 than in all of 2020.Slavitt ends his book wondering whether “the lessons of the past year might be forgotten”. Don’t rule that out. More

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      ‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisis

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      When the pandemic struck, George Packer moved his family out of the city and upstate into the countryside.The move forced one America’s most celebrated and decorated non-fiction writers, famous for his reporting, to sit still for once – and to contemplate what was happening to his country.The result is an extended essay, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, a meditation on the crippling division of the nation into irreconcilable political tribes, on to which Packer has added some reflections on the way out of the mire.“I felt immobilised as a reporter,” Packer said. “It seemed like an essay was the thing to do – just put down a bunch of thoughts that get stirred up when you’re sitting in one place for a long time, looking hard at yourself and your country. So it was a Covid book for sure, making the best of a bad situation.”In some ways it is a long epilogue to a previous work, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, for which Packer won the National Book Award in 2013. That was a deeply reported account of the shredding of the social fabric. Last Best Hope is a stock-taking two presidential terms later, after the rise and fall of Donald Trump, who the author sees as the inevitable symptom of the national unraveling.Instead of getting in his car and driving across the country, Packer ordered a small pile of essays which did what he was trying to achieve, a diagnosis of a nation in crisis. One was a pamphlet by Walt Whitman called Democratic Vistas, “a passionate, wonderful book”; another was Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, by the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1914.Packer also looked abroad, rereading George Orwell’s essay on wartime Britain, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, as well as Strange Defeat, a contemplation by French historian Marc Bloch of the chronic failings that gifted Hitler his easy conquest in 1940, published after its author was executed by the Nazis. Packer sees a parallel between France’s shock at being routed with the humbling of America in the face of Covid-19.Sitting alongside these shorter works in Packer’s rural retreat was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, an observation of the country and what made it different written by a French observer just over a half-century after its founding. Packer describes it as “a masterpiece of sociology and observation and political analysis”.He finished writing Last Best Hope at a point when the democracy de Tocqueville had described had barely survived a direct onslaught, the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol aimed at reversing the election result.“I think we dodged more than a bullet – a mortar round,” Packer said, noting that if Republican election officials in Georgia and Republican-appointed judges around the country had done the bidding of their president and party, and overturned the election, the battle would have spilled bloodily into the streets. And if Trump had not been so staggeringly inept in his handling of the pandemic, Packer believes he would have won easily.The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient“I’ve seen the foreshadowing of something I never expected to see, never imagined, which is the end of our democracy,” he said. “I lived through a lot of bad political periods, but that never seemed to be on the horizon.”On closer examination, American democracy might not have dodged the bullet, or the mortar round, after all. It may have been badly wounded.Packer says he sees the courts, and state election machinery, and all the institutions that just about held the line in 2020, as “a patient getting out of bed after a really long illness and having just the strength to walk across the room”. The analogy raises the question of whether the patient will have the will and the vitality to do the same in 2022 or 2024.“The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient at the moment,” Packer said. “They’re sneaking into the room and injecting toxins in the form of voter suppression laws and conspiracy theories and lies. So yeah, it’s a real question whether a democracy can survive if nearly half the country has embraced an anti-democratic worldview. That’s kind of the question we’re facing right now.”Real America, Just America … and moreOne of the side effects of Packer’s Covid-led move out of the city was that it brought him into proximity with people who saw the nation through a very different prism. He describes the night when he first sees Trump lawn signs in the yard of polite and friendly neighbours.“Five white letters stretched across a sign,” he writes. “The blaring shade of that red instantly told me what the five letters said.”His visceral reaction to Trumpists led to some introspection about the roots of those emotions and what they implied on a national scale.“My attitude had something to do with my good luck,” he writes. “My life savings were doing pretty well. I was comfortable and was afraid, and this fearful security shut down my imaginative sympathy. No wonder they resented me as much as I despised them.”One of the central propositions in Last Best Hope is that the American political firmament has shattered into four rival narratives, crossing across the old red-blue divide. There is the Free America of small-government conservatives, who put the liberty of the individual above all; the Smart America of a smug, comfortable intellectual elite; the Real America of white Christian nationalism, the driving force behind populism; and there is Just America, built increasingly around identity politics and critical theory.His disdain for the latter, which he sees as both elitist and a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, is the main point of contention over his book on the left.“Just America embraces an ideology of rigid identity groups that keeps the professional class in its superior place, divides workers, and has little to do with the reality of an increasingly multiracial, intermarrying society,” Packer writes.His description of Black Lives Matter protesters in New York in the summer of 2020 as “disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year” has raised hackles, to say the least.Critics accuse Packer of underestimating the fury of Black Americans at having to live in constant fear of lethal police brutality, and their agency in driving the BLM movement and the Biden campaign, helping it succeed where Hillary Clinton failed. Packer argues that presents a distorted view of the underpinnings of Biden’s victory.“I take issue with the notion that – let’s call it – the ‘identity left’ carried Biden over the line,” he said. “I think a coalition of groups carried Biden over the line, including suburbanites, including Never-Trump Republicans, including working class, black and Latino voters who voted for Biden in the primaries, who got him the nomination, when they could have gone for someone more closely identified with the left.”Biden really does have a feel for workers and for labourHe sees Biden as occupying space outside his Four Americas grid, a throwback to an age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and of powerful, respected labour unions. Packer approves.“He really does have a feel for workers and for labour. And I think he understands that you don’t advance the cause of equality by speaking to Americans as if they are members of monolithic identity groups that are somehow in perpetual conflict with each other.”To the extent that Packer has a remedy for America’s ills it lies in the reaffirmation of that trait De Tocqueville identified in the 1830s: a commitment to equality. And that, he argues, can only be achieved by the unification of the working class.It all sounds a bit un-American. For decades, the overwhelming majority of the population identified as middle class, the class to which almost every aspiring politician still appeals. But that aspirational self-image has been ground down over decades by the rapacity of the global economy and the elites who are its beneficiaries.“They don’t have the dignity that society once conferred on them,” Packer said. “They’re just struggling, drowning, paid abysmal wages, with no union to represent them. And now they’ve disappeared altogether because we have one-click shopping. So the working class is something we never have to think about because we don’t see them.”The pandemic, however, brought the working class back into the spotlight, albeit temporarily. The “knowledge workers” and the opinion-forming elites stranded at home were suddenly reliant on the essential workers who kept virtually the whole economy going with services and deliveries.Just maybe, Packer says, this moment of renewed appreciation can be leveraged under Biden into a real improvement in living standards of this virtually invisible majority, from all four Americas.‘Pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas’Some of the prescriptions in the tail end of the book, for restoring equality and the “art of self-government”, come across as somewhat fanciful, like calling on Americans to turn off Twitter and Facebook and do a year of national service, so followers of the four narratives have to spend some time in each other’s company.“The last pages are full of pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas,” Packer admitted, bluntly. “I’m not a political operative so I don’t think it’s my job to figure out how to get it passed through Congress. But I did feel the need to lay down a direction – here’s the way we need to go.”The key word in the book’s title is “hope” and it recalls a much earlier book on the American condition by the bard of the working classes, Stud Terkel. Terkel’s book was Hope Dies Last. For Packer, it is a necessity as much as a conviction.“For one thing I have kids, and it’s just almost psychologically impossible not to hold out hope,” he said.He believes Biden’s administration has a window in which it can address some national divisions indirectly, by demonstrating the power of government to change people’s lives for the better.“It won’t happen with a speech or with an open hand or with a plea, because the divisions are so deep and corrosive. It almost has to happen unconsciously,” Packer concluded. “I think we’re actually be getting to go in that direction, very slowly, with a lot of dangerous obstacles ahead.” More

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      After the Fall by Ben Rhodes review – nostalgic for certainties

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      Ben Rhodes was Barack Obama’s speechwriter and became one of the former president’s closest aides, a constant presence at his shoulder as he toured the world and sat down with the powerful and famous. Three years ago, soon after leaving the White House, Rhodes wrote a compelling insider account of that era called The World As It Is. He has now written the sequel, and has opted for the apocalyptic title After the Fall. It is the story of an aftermath, of the acolyte still travelling the globe with the greying former president as he garners awards, mobbed by adoring fans. A rueful Obama muses about his transition from political force to celebrity, adored but virtually powerless.After the Fall is a cleverly chosen title. It is about the ending of an administration and the aspirations of those who served in it, who look on aghast at the reign of Donald Trump. But it also has the suggestion of original sin – in this case, the US’s. The subtitle is Being American in the World We’ve Made, and the central theme of the book is a contemplation of the seeds of the country’s fall from grace in the world. Trump’s crassness is not the cause of the descent, but a symptom.Rhodes traces much of the decline to the 9/11 attacks and the George W Bush administration’s reaction to them, which sought to “reorient America’s entire national purpose to the task of fighting terrorism”. The Iraq invasion, in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, “cracked open the facade that elites in the United States knew what they were doing” and called into question “why Americans were the stewards of world order”. Then came the largely made-in-America financial crash of 2008, destabilising politics-as-usual around the world. At home, a pivotal 5-4 vote by the US supreme court in 2010 opened the floodgates to unaccountable “dark money” saturating politics. Meanwhile ever more extreme politics were facilitated by Facebook, Twitter and the like.“Profit-driven social media algorithms, like unchecked political contributions, were treated as free speech beyond the reach of government regulations,” Rhodes writes. He travels around the world observing the plight of other frail societies, such as Myanmar, Hungary, Russia and Hong Kong, where democracy is in retreat or has been routed altogether. He talks to dissidents trying to push back against the tide, and finds common strands in the American malaise and the rest of the world’s. Little of the analysis is new or original, but it is certainly elegantly expressed. This is the man, after all, with a degree in creative writing, who wrote so many of Obama’s soaring speeches.And Rhodes does have an interesting personal tale to tell. He found out from reporting by the Observer in May 2018 that a shady firm of Israeli ex-spooks-for-hire called Black Cube was sniffing around him and another Obama staffer, Colin Kahl. The firm had been hired by the Trump camp to discredit the top officials involved in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The abortive smear effort involved sending creepy fake emails to Rhodes’s wife. She did not fall for it but the experience so unnerved her that she insisted on moving their young family out of the political crosshairs to Los Angeles. Rhodes cannot help wondering if the family’s decision to flee politics is what his persecutors wanted all along. To kill off political engagement and drive an activist generation towards apathy and cynicism. He comes to the realisation that he is “a casualty of a war over identity – who defines it and who doesn’t, what is true and what isn’t, what happened and what didn’t, who you are and who you aren’t.”There is a very personal element to After the Fall in which Rhodes admits to disorientation and a desire for purpose in the long spiralling descent from the Oval Office. “I was a thirty-nine-year-old with as little idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life as I’d had as a twenty-three-year-old,” he reflects. “History was no longer something that took place in rooms where I sat.” The introspection, coupled with an itinerary of venerable European destinations, such as Paris, Budapest and Baden-Baden, sometimes gives the book the feel of a melancholy Chekhovian tale: the young courtier in the retinue of a revered, recently ousted monarch, touring old watering holes. He meets like-minded contemporaries, including Hungarian, Russian and Hong Kong dissidents, and they try to come to terms with the implosion of the world they had once hoped for.Throughout, Rhodes struggles with a certain ennui. On a trip to Yangon, he wanders into a pagoda and “sat staring at a Buddha, waiting to feel something”. Some of the best passages arise when he is back together with his old boss, and we are given an insight into what Obama thinks of it all, including the acerbic and memorable observation that “Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s acquittal was to a lot of black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”We can also sit in while Obama considers the leadership challenge facing the progressive democratic cause in the US and further afield. Surveying the candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries, the former president says he agrees with Bernie Sanders in his diagnosis of America’s malaise, a system chronically rigged to benefit the very rich. “But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about it,” Obama adds. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not nationalist.” Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are better at invoking national unity but don’t have Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s fire in the belly, their outrage. Searching for a historical precedent of a progressive leader who could offer both, Obama has to go all the way back to Bobby Kennedy.It illustrates a certain nostalgia pervading the book, looking back at the times before the fall, and the allure of the apparent certainties of Rhodes’s youth, when America seemed to have all the answers. They still exert their pull on him, even though he now knows them to be hollow. More

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      Michael Wolff to publish third exposé of Trump, covering last days in office

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      Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump, focusing on the final days of his presidency, will be published in July under a provocative title: Landslide.Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college – a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016.Trump has pursued the lie that Biden’s victory was the result of electoral fraud – a speech on the subject fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January, leading to a second impeachment trial.Though Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night he “didn’t win” and wished Biden well, he also said the election was “unbelievably unfair”.Wolff published his first Trump tell-all in January 2018, rocking the White House when the Guardian broke news of the book, Fire and Fury.Trump sought to block publication, calling Wolff “a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book”. The reading public ignored him: the explosive exposé sold 1.7m copies in its first three weeks.In 2019 Wolff published Siege, which looked at a “presidency under fire”, tackling topics including Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow.Wolff no longer enjoyed unfettered West Wing access but he did produce a bombshell, again first reported by the Guardian: that Mueller’s team had prepared and shelved an indictment of the president, on three counts of obstruction of justice.Wolff said he obtained the documents from “sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”. The special counsel rejected his claim, a spokesman saying: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”Amid such controversy, and with competitors having flooded the shelves with reportage on the chaotic Trump presidency, Siege did not sell as well as Fire and Fury.Like its predecessor, Siege used Steve Bannon as a major source. By then, however, the far-right provocateur was no longer a White House strategist or even, thanks to his cooperation for Fire and Fury which enraged the president, a major figure in Trumpworld.On Thursday, Wolff’s publisher said he had interviewed the former president. It also said Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, would focus on his “tumultuous last months at the helm of the country”.Out on 27 July from Little, Brown in the UK and Macmillan in the US, the book is based on what the publishers called “extraordinary access to White House aides and to the former president himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world”.Trump has claimed to be writing “the book of all books” himself. In a statement last week, he claimed he had “turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers”, adding: “I do not want a deal right now. I’m writing like crazy anyway, however.”After major publishers said they would not touch a Trump memoir, he insisted “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses have made very substantial offers which I have rejected”.“That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future,” he said. “… If my book will be the biggest of them all … does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money?”Possibly to Trump’s chagrin, those who served him in office have found publishers eager to release their memoirs – and to pay a lot of money to do so.Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has a “seven-figure”, two-book deal – despite a staff rebellion at Simon & Schuster.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has a deal for a “definitive” account of the Trump presidency. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint at HarperCollins, has said the book will come out in early 2022. The price of the deal was not disclosed.Last November, shortly after Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, Barack Obama published the first volume of a projected two-part memoir that was sold to Penguin Random House with books by his wife, Michelle Obama, for a reported $65m. The former president’s book, A Promised Land, sold strongly.Another former president, Bill Clinton, has moved into fiction. The President’s Daughter – his second thriller, in this case about a president who also happens to be a former Navy Seal – is again written with James Patterson. This week, it debuted at No1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers list. More

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      Bill Clinton: ‘I always wanted to be a writer, but doubted my ability to do it’

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      The book I am currently readingThe End of Everything by Katie Mack. The theoretical physicist explains the five most likely endings for our expanding universe, hopefully an unimaginably long time from now. It’s witty, clear and upbeat. A good companion to Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time. I’m also reading Minds Wide Shut by Gary Saul Morson and Morton O Schapiro, a sweeping study of the rise of rigid certainty in politics, economics and literature, and the threat it presents to democracy, which requires open-mindedness and compromise.The book that changed my lifeThe Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It made me rethink the roots of our deepest fears and insecurities, and why we often disappoint ourselves in how we manifest them.The book I wish I’d writtenOne Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I still believe it’s the greatest novel written since William Faulkner died.Read John Grisham’s Sooley, you’ll want to cry tooThe book that had the greatest influence on my writingI always wanted to be a writer, but doubted my ability to do it. From my senior year in college to my first year in law school, I read five books that made me think it was worth a try: North Toward Home by Willie Morris; The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron; You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe; The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.The book that changed my mindThat’s a great question. I think Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Adam Grant’s Think Again forced me to rethink how deeply embedded our unexamined preconceptions are, not just in relation to race, gender, class and religion, but to any number of categories that lead us to see others as inferior, less worthy of being seen and heard. I like Nelson Mandela’s way of restorative reconciliation and inclusion better.The last book that made me crySooley by John Grisham. Read it, you’ll want to cry too.The last book that made me laughJanet Evanovich’s latest book. Stephanie Plum always makes me laugh.The book I’m ashamed not to have readUlysses. I love Irish poetry, prose and nonfiction. I love Joyce. But I always give out and give up before I get through it. I’ll keep trying.The books I give as giftsMeditations by Marcus Aurelius; The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney; and The Social Conquest of Earth by EO Wilson. In different ways, each is full of wisdom.The book I’d most like to be remembered forSo far My Life, for the reasons Larry McMurtry stated in his review: it’s a story of my life and times; an account of what it’s like to be president when so much is happening at once, with fuller explanations of events such as Black Hawk Down that you won’t see anywhere else; and a testament of what I believe and why.My comfort readI find comfort in thrillers with interesting characters and good stories. I really liked Stacey Abrams’s While Justice Sleeps, and all of Louise Penny’s Gamache books, Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski books, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins books, James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series, and Michael Connelly’s Bosch books. I love Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon, and David Baldacci and Lee Child are still getting better. And I love my co-author James Patterson’s books, especially those with Michael Bennett and Alex Cross. I hope our new book, The President’s Daughter, makes other people’s lists. I like the characters and the story.The book I think is most underratedProbably Ron Chernow’s Grant. He makes an irrefutable case not just for Grant’s genius as a military leader, but for his courage and determination to ensure that the American civil war was not fought in vain. With the latest efforts to discredit the 2020 election, pass voter suppression measures, and kill the January 6 commission, and the changing composition of the supreme court, we are reminded of what Grant knew: the risks of making our union more perfect includes the possibility that the inevitable reaction can rob us of our democracy altogether. More

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      ‘Nixon is much more serious than Trump’: Michael Dobbs and the tale of the White House tapes

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      “I love you, as you know,” says Richard Nixon. “Like my brother.”The 37th president is bidding farewell to chief of staff Bob Haldeman in an unexpectedly intimate phone call that, half a century later, lingers in the air like a ghost.Donald Trump had tweets but Nixon had tapes: 3,700 hours of them, secretly recorded by a White House system the East German Stasi might have envied. The conversations were released between 2007 and 2013, an eavesdropping opportunity never likely to be repeated.They have proved a goldmine for Michael Dobbs, a British-born author and journalist whose elegantly written book, King Richard – Nixon and Watergate: An American Tragedy, zooms in on the hundred days that followed Nixon’s second inauguration and led to his downfall.The narrative follows Nixon from room to room, day by day, sometimes minute by minute. It tells how the tapes capture ice cubes tinkling in a glass, Nixon’s voice softening when his 24-year-old daughter Julie calls and, as the world knows, some bilious rants about the media as the Watergate scandal deepens.Why did this famously secretive president leave such an incriminating trace? Nixon never intended for the tapes, made between February 1971 and July 1973, to become public. But he did have an eye on posterity.“It’s a bit like Churchill said: ‘History will be kind to me because I intend to write it myself,’” says Dobbs, 70.“That was Nixon’s idea as well. This is one difference from Trump: [Nixon] really had studied history in some depth, and compared himself to people like Churchill and De Gaulle. He wanted to write memoirs that would justify his place in history and particularly undercut any attempts by uppity aides like [Henry] Kissinger to claim all the credit for his foreign policy initiatives.The tapes force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself“So he never imagined that the tapes would become public. He thought they were just going to be his private property that he could draw on for writing his memoirs. Of course, he didn’t really understand that just to go back and listen to these tapes, he’d have to spend his entire retirement trying to decipher them. The tapes became completely out of control in the end.”Lyndon Johnson recorded about 800 hours of phone calls but Nixon took it to a whole new level. Dobbs says: “The difference with Nixon was that he was so ham-fisted and a bit of a klutz that he didn’t know how to turn tape recorders on and off so they invented a system which turned out to be completely diabolic: it would just turn on by itself. It recorded absolutely everything without any sort of input from him, which is what really did him in in the end.”Sometimes Nixon could forget the tapes were running as he and his aides plotted dirty tricks, unleashed crude diatribes or made racist asides. In one, Haldeman suggests that the White House counsel, John Dean, must have been taking out “all his frustrations in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex”.Nixon’s Trump-like loathing of the media includes a boast that he “really stuck ’em in the groin”. It also crops up in a conversation with his special counsel, Chuck Colson, on the eve of his inauguration. Dobbs says: “He’s about to give this speech and he’s gloating with Colson, his hatchet man, about how he’s going to stick it to the Washington Post and drive the Post’s share price down. He generally calls the reporters ‘the bastards’.”At this point, Nixon was riding high after a thumping election victory and with a near-70% approval rating. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex, seven months prior, was seemingly behind him despite the efforts of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.“But then, within just a few weeks and months, the whole thing has completely unravelled and you have all these people within the White House at each other’s throats and, as Nixon says, ‘pissing on each other’ and eventually pissing on the president. So it’s an amazing three-month period in which probably one of the most disciplined White House operations in history completely falls apart.”By July 1973, some of Nixon’s advisers were pleading with him to destroy the tapes lest they reveal his part in the Watergate cover-up. He felt they would strengthen his defence. He was wrong.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s testimony that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and was forced to resign in August 1974, before he could be impeached.Dobbs reflects: “At a certain point, it becomes Dean’s word against Nixon’s word. There wasn’t sufficient evidence to impeach the president at that point. The only reason that he was forced to resign was because the tapes started coming out and that went all the way to the supreme court. Without the tapes, there would not have been a sufficient basis to force Nixon out of office.”And yet, as Dobbs listened, he also found the tapes that ruined Nixon’s reputation in the moment could yet provide a measure of redemption.“What they do is to force a writer to step into his shoes and to see events from his point of view so you see him destroy himself and destroy his presidency and the pain and agony that he feels.“Unless you’re an absolute dyed-in-the-wool Nixon hater, you have to feel some sympathy for the man, not because you approve of what he did, but just on a personal level.”The president’s conversations with his daughters help humanise him.“You can relate to him the way he talks to Julie, particularly if you’ve listened to the previous tape of him talking to Haldeman. Suddenly he’s switching from being an irascible president who’s barking orders at people to being a loving father.”Then there is that wistful call with Haldeman, who knew the president better than anyone.“Nixon never invited him to a family meal, never shook hands with him, and then suddenly here is Nixon saying, ‘I love you like my brother.’ If you know the background of Nixon’s two brothers dying from tuberculosis when he was a young man, it’s extraordinary.”Dobbs wrote the book during Trump’s scandal-peppered, twice-impeached, one-term presidency. Parallels with Nixon were inescapable: the exploitation of racial resentment, the whipping up of the “silent majority”, the hostility towards the press and east coast elites. But he believes there are key differences too.“Nixon is a much more substantive, serious person than Trump and he had a real sophisticated understanding of history and foreign policy. We don’t know how Trump is going to be treated by historians, 40, 50 years later, but I find Nixon a more empathetic character than Trump.“To some extent, Nixon has succeeded in rehabilitating himself, or at least we have a more nuanced picture of Nixon now. I’m not sure that Trump is going to be rehabilitated, at least among historians.”The author, a dual British-American citizen who has worked for the Guardian and Washington Post, continues: “One distinguishing thing between the two of them is the whole claim that the election was rigged and stolen from Trump. Although Nixon did have a lot of grudges about particularly the 1960 election and felt the Kennedys had stolen it from him, he did not go public with that and he did not try to dispute it in any serious way.“He accepted it because he thought that was one rule of the game. Trump completely threw that rule of the game overboard. Nixon is within the mainstream American presidents. Trump is outside the mainstream.”It remains to be seen whether historians will regard Trump as a Shakespearean figure or conclude he was simply not that psychologically interesting. Dobbs believes Nixon, who rose from poverty to the presidency only to endure catastrophe, does meet the King Lear standard. Along with its theatrical title, the book is divided into four “acts” and has a list of “dramatic personae”.“To call him a Shakespearean tragic hero does not mean that you approve of him or you like him,” Dobbs says. “It means that you’re just struck by this fall from grace and you’ve become aware of the suffering involved. I was more interested in telling the story than to pass judgment.”Exit, pursued by a tape recorder. More

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      Zero Fail review: US Secret Service as presidential protectors – and drunken frat boys

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      At times, the US Secret Service has resembled a bunch of pistol-toting frat boys on a taxpayer-funded spring break. In the words of a drunken supervisor speaking to his men in the run-up to a 2012 summit in Cartagena, Colombia: “You don’t know how lucky you are … You are going to fuck your way across the globe.”Disturbingly, the debacle in Colombia was not a one-off, as Carol Leonnig makes clear. Rather, it was the most glaring episode in an accumulation of horribles. Six agents were dismissed, another six disciplined.Leonnig knows of what she writes. She won a Pulitzer for her reporting on security lapses at the Secret Service, including the “Vegas bachelor party” in South America, and was part of the Washington Post team that scored a Pulitzer for its work on Edward Snowden’s war on the National Security Agency.She also worked with Philip Rucker on A Very Stable Genius, one of the better and more informative books on Donald Trump’s time in the White House. Now she delivers her first solo work, Zero Fail. It paints an alarming portrait of those dedicated to protecting the president and offers a comprehensive look at an agency that has seen better days.In 2009, Michaele and Tareq Salahi slipped through White House security, attended a state dinner and met Barack Obama. In 2015, a pair of soused senior agents crashed an official car into the White House complex.There are incidents of shots being fired into the White House, an intruder making it into the building and an agent on Mike Pence’s detail hooking up with a hooker.The Secret Service’s motto? “Worthy of Trust and Confidence.”Leonnig tells of agents taking selfies with Donald Trump’s sleeping grandson. Trump asked their supervisor, “These guys weren’t being pervs, right?”The response: “They were just being idiots.”Zero Fail convincingly argues that the men and women who guard the president, the vice-president and their families are overworked. Leonnig also contends the Secret Service is a victim of mission creep, a buddy system saddled with out-of-date technology, a culture wedded to doing things because that is how they have always been done.When one young agent brought a pair of fresh eyes to the situation, he was dropped. His critique is now the stuff of in-house legend.Once part of the US Treasury, the Secret Service is presently housed within the Department of Homeland Security – a change that ultimately made little difference. Being swallowed by a bureaucratic Frankenstein did not help morale. The Secret Service became another body-part stitched to a cabinet ministry cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11.A boost to the budget was not sustained. Trump’s persistent travels to Mar-a-Lago left the Secret Service operating on a shoestring.“Trump has set back this agency 10 years,” one former agent who departed during Trump’s tenure confides to Leonnig. “The overall culture and way of doing things took a big step back.”Time has dulled the images of selflessness displayed in Dallas in November 1963 and outside the Capitol Hilton in 1981. Clint Hill threw himself on to President Kennedy’s limousine. Rufus Youngblood Jr used his body to shield Lyndon Johnson. Tim McCarthy took a bullet meant for Ronald Reagan. Jerry Parr bundled the president away.Unwelcome occurrences are not always gamed out. As former agent Jonathan Wackrow puts it: “The policies and procedures of the Secret Service are born out of blood.”When the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, agents removed Dick Cheney from his office but were delayed in delivering the vice-president to a secure location. Chains of command stymied his immediate entry into a designated shelter. That and the lack of a key.In chronicling the heroics, failures and foibles of the Secret Service, Leonnig also opens a window on the families the agents served. Not surprisingly, some fare better than others. The Clintons and Carters trail the Bushes and Reagans.The agents respected and admired George and Barbara Bush. The feeling was mutual. The Bushes “treated the Secret Service agents who protected them and their large brood like part of the extended family – not like ‘the help’.” At Christmas, the Bushes delayed their celebration so agents could be home with their families. The former head of the Bush detail told Leonnig: “That’s why people would do anything for the President and Mrs Bush.”The Clintons stood on the other end of the spectrum. Bill’s priapic adventures were a headache and Hillary came to be loathed. As for Chelsea, Leonnig tells of her cutting short a telephone conversation with a friend as agents arrived.“I’ve got to go,” the youngest Clinton is remembered saying. “The pigs are here.”Reminded that the agents’ job was to “stand between you, your family and a bullet”, Chelsea reportedly responded: “Well, that’s what my mother and father call you.”The story spread. Suffice to say, Hillary’s “foul mouth” didn’t help her standing with those who protected her. Nor for that matter did the Secret Service’s personnel and culture, which leaned conservative and Republican. Bill and Hillary were children of the 60s. Military service and baking cookies were not for them.Whether and how the Secret Service rebounds remains to be seen. In the aftermath of the insurrection of 6 January, “one Secret Service officer called the armed protesters ‘patriots’ seeking to undo an illegitimate election”, according to Zero Fail. The agent also “falsely claimed to her friends that disguised antifa members had started the violence”, a view still held by the former president’s minions. Members of the Trump detail have been reassigned.To rejuvenate the Secret Service, work needs to be done. At a minimum, Leonnig’s book will get people talking and thinking. More

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      Battle for the Soul review: how Biden beat Trump – and exposed Democratic divides

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      On Saturday 7 November, the networks finally called the election for Joe Biden. Barack Obama’s vice-president prevailed by more than 7m votes but his margin in the electoral college was too close for comfort. The Democrats lost seats in the House and did not take control of the Senate until January, when Biden took office. America stands divided but the Democrats’ own fissures are also on display.The party of Jackson, FDR and JFK is now an upstairs-down coalition of coastal elites and minorities, hounded by politically self-destructive demands for defunding the police and ever greater wokeness. As Biden acknowledged to Edward-Isaac Dovere, when he won the White House at the third attempt, the former senator from Delaware was the “dog who caught the bus”. Now what?Dovere’s first book is informed and granular, filled with up-close quotes and lacerating observations, a must-read for newsrooms and political junkies. It captures Biden’s post-2016 ascent and the conflicts within his party.Donald Trump weighs on the narrative but is not its focal point. Pride of place goes to Biden and Obama. They are plenty interesting.Obama is portrayed as skeptical of Biden’s chances and doubtful of his ability to energize a crowd. In his eyes, Biden could strut, wear Ray-Bans … and then “stumble”. He did not mesmerize.“Americans liked their presidents to have some swagger,” Obama thought.Likewise, Biden knew he was no Obama, saying: “I’ve never seen a man who’s better at talking to a thousand people than to one.”Still, Biden understood that he could relate on the quotidian level. At 30, he buried a wife and daughter. Decades later he lost his elder son to cancer and watched the other become mired in a hellscape of booze, pills and powder.If Biden seethed with ambition, at least he did reasonable job of avoiding self-delusion. Battle for the Soul depicts Eric Holder, Obama’s friend and former attorney general, as overly optimistic about the 44th president’s powers. And that is being kind.Holder actually believed Obama’s win in 2008 would usher in an Aquarian age. “Everyone thought his election would lead to a post-racial society,” according to Holder, adding that “somehow the normal rules would not apply” and “that all things negative” would be gone.The only thing missing from that tableau was a cotton candy unicorn.Biden saw his own candidacy more prosaically. He could be “what stopped the backlash that Obama had set off”, a modest but important feat. By the numbers, Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s margins among white voters – with and without college degrees.Over time the GOP traded upward arc for resentment as its central message and ceded the votes of Americans with four-year degrees. The flip side: Battle for the Soul records Biden lamenting the disconnect between his party and their old lunch-bucket base. The descendants of Ellis Island had forgotten their forbears. The New Deal was no longer a memory.On that score, Biden criticizes the Democrats for emphasizing the plight of the poor at the expense of society’s middle rungs.“How many times did you hear us, even in parts of our administration, talking about the middle class?” he asks Dovere.A graduate of the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School, Biden criticized the left for embracing the abstract and Medicare for All over what people actually needed.“Some of the party sort of became a little bit elitist,” Biden conceded. The faculty lounge had replaced the political clubhouse. When it came to defunding the police, Biden refused to buy what the progressives were selling. In his campaign autobiography, Promise Me Dad, he took pride in “close relationship with the police and the civil rights community”.Whether Biden can bridge those two groups in office may determine the outcome of the midterms and his chances of re-election. In the summer of 2020, amid protests against police brutality and racism, Biden feared Trump’s message of law and order would resonate. In the end, it almost did.Murder is up. America’s cities are shooting galleries again. The murder of George Floyd by a police officer continues to reverberate. Unfortunately, the gap between police and policed widens. The urban landscape festers.Dovere aims some of his sharpest slings at Jared Kushner. In 2016, after a post-election tour of the West Wing, Trump’s son-in-law noted the decor and announced to his guides: “Oh Mr Trump is going to love this … It’s going to remind him of one of his golf clubhouses.”In the author’s words, Kushner was a “wannabe wunderkind” whose biggest achievement was “over-leveraging himself into the most expensive real estate deal in New York City history”.Ted Cruz also receives his share of scorn. Dovere labels the Texas senator a “self-styled great moralizer who brought intellectual imperiousness to his labored Elmer Gantry impression”. Unlike Kushner, Cruz fundraises off such turns of phrase. There’s nothing like saying: “I’m persecuted, I’m No 1.”How much more Biden accomplishes remains to be seen. The pandemic appears to have subsided, if it has not been vanquished. The economy grows, albeit unevenly. What additional legislation will be passed is unknown; 4 July is almost here and there is no infrastructure bill.If politics teaches us anything it is that culture counts and crime matters. How Biden and the Democrats navigate these challenges is an open question. Should Nancy Pelosi loses the speaker’s gavel, Biden will be forced to contend with both the Republicans and the Squad, the influential group of progressive House women. For any mortal, that would be a daunting task.Battle for the Soul provides ample warning and plenty of food for thought. More