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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
      TopicsBooksFeminismWomenPolitics booksUS politicsAir transportUS constitution and civil libertiesreviewsReuse this content More

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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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      ‘Name names? Never, never, never!’ Lee Grant on her decades of defiance

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      Interview‘Name names? Never, never, never!’ Lee Grant on her decades of defianceEmma Brockes The Oscar-winning actor lost 12 years of her career refusing to out her partner as a communist, then had to endure his lectures about Marx while being treated as a ‘maid’. But a remarkable third act as a documentarian showcased her unique voiceLee Grant, child of the Depression, survivor of the anti-communist blacklist, director, Oscar winner and – incredibly – 95 and looking nothing of the sort, is standing in her Manhattan kitchen. It is the size of a medieval castle’s, with copper pots hanging from the ceiling, a catering-size fridge and what appear to be three ovens. “They’re all used,” says Grant, triumphantly, a tone she has earned. For 12 years during the McCarthy-era witch-hunt of the 1950s, Grant was banned from working in Hollywood, re-emerging in the 60s to become not only a wildly successful actor, but one of the US’s finest documentary makers of the late 20th century. Over the course of our conversation, the phrase she uses most often is “I was lucky”.If you have seen Grant on screen, it was most likely in one of her two best-known roles, from very different, seminal films. In 1967, she appeared as Mrs Colbert, the grieving widow, in the classic Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night. Eight years later, she played opposite Warren Beatty in the cult favourite Shampoo, for which she won an Oscar. Grant is a terrific actor, with a Zelig-like performance history that begins as a child dancer at the New York Ballet under George Balanchine (“My only memory of him is of my mother flirting with him; I was a fat little girl, that’s how I got in”), on through a scholarship at New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theater under Martha Graham, and, after her acting career was unfrozen at the age of 33 – “old for Hollywood!” – includes a heady decade living in Malibu knocking around in Joan Didion’s circle. “It was like entering The Truman Show. I get to live here? On the beach? With my eight-year-old daughter? Are you sure?! It was so delicious. And then I met Joey.”Grant sits at her kitchen table, her second husband, Joe Feury, working in the vast living room next door. Together, they ran a successful production company specialising in documentary film, a genre in which Grant says she would never have been successful had she not survived those 12 years on the blacklist – or met Feury. (“Joey thought I could do anything,” she writes in her memoir, I Said Yes to Everything. “And I could.”) Grant grew up 50 blocks north of where we are sitting in Washington Heights, the only child of successful immigrants to New York. Her mother’s family were from Odessa, in present-day Ukraine, her father’s from Poland. Her father ran the YMHA, the Hebrew youth hostel in the Bronx, and her devoted mother and aunt Fremo ran a nursery school from the brownstone where they lived.It was a charmed childhood. “Fremo!” Grant’s mother would exclaim, pointing at four-year-old Grant, or Lyova Rosenthal as she was, then. “Look how she walks! How she talks! Sing something! Did you see that, did you hear that? Genius!” Grant bursts into laughter, remembering the scene. “I knew it was crazy; it was so theatrical. And delicious. They were very delicious, and funny.” And although it wasn’t a political household, they were political times, not only as the Depression raged across the US, but closer to home. Walking down Convent Avenue in the early 30s, says Grant, “the little girls who were on the steps of the Catholic school would shout: ‘You killed our Lord!’” She found this both surprising and comic. “I don’t think I felt sad about it; it was more like: ‘That’s strange. Me? I killed your Lord?’”Grant was innately confrontational, “something I was born with, no question about it”. The first time she recalls standing up for something in public, she was a teenager, walking along a stretch of Broadway near her house when she witnessed a man attacking a woman. The woman tried, desperately, to board a bus, but when the bus driver clocked the commotion, he shut the doors and drove on. Others in the street ignored it. Only Grant reacted. “I ran for a cop.” She ran three blocks, and the couple were gone by the time they returned. “Oh,” said the cop, “they’re probably in a bar now. It’s just a normal thing, don’t worry.” She did worry. “They didn’t have the kind of sensibility that I had. And then I married a blacklisted writer. And there was no hesitation. I certainly was not going to give names in order to work in film or television.”There wasn’t a second when …?“NOT EVEN A SECOND!” she booms. “Never, never, never!” Decades later, when she started to make searing documentaries about homeless Americans, victims of domestic violence and women in prison, she says, “I’d been there. I’d been on the other side almost all my life.”The man she married was called Arnold Manoff, and it cost her the first 12 years of her career. In 1951, straight out of acting school, Grant won a role in a Hollywood movie, Detective Story, with Kirk Douglas, and was promptly nominated for a best supporting Oscar. She was 23 years old and a huge future awaited. But by the time the film came out, Manoff, a communist writer, had been blacklisted – and so, by association, had Grant. A different person would have been furiously bitter. Grant was furious all right: “I was filled with rage and frustration at the blacklisters, who I was living among.” But she wasn’t bitter. She was ignited by a sense of injustice and common cause. In the beginning, she says, “we all stuck together and I really loved those people. And respected them. And they educated me. I had no education, I never went to college. I went right into acting. I felt lucky.”Soon, however, the situation curdled. Manoff was a bully and a hypocrite. “I was living with a man who had nothing but contempt for me,” says Grant. He tried to make her read Marx and Engels. “But I couldn’t get it,” she says. “I didn’t know what it meant.” She found a box of old letters she wrote to him, recently (he died in 1965), and was horrified. “They’re all supplications: ‘I can’t learn Marx, I’m sorry but I can’t.’” Looking back, she understands that he married her mainly to have someone to look after this two children from his first marriage. He belittled and controlled her. When, after the birth of their daughter, Dinah, Grant had an opportunity to appear in a play in upstate New York, her husband said he’d leave her if she took the job. Without hesitation, she took it. “I knew I had to go. Life was over. He didn’t like me at all. He was attracted to me in the beginning, and then it was over. I was the maid, I really was.” The funny thing is, I say, you ended up making a more political body of work than any of the men lecturing you to read Marx before putting on the dinner.“Lecturing the women around them, yes,” she hoots, then looks infinitely fierce. “Those fuckers.”The takeaway from those years was that Grant learned how to fight. She and some of her friends took on the fanatically pro-McCarthy clique that ran the TV union, and slowly, methodically lobbied members to vote them out and replace them with moderates. Eventually, she was permitted to return to Hollywood – three years after everyone else, “because they still thought I’d name my husband”. (She didn’t.) By then she was ancient by the standards of the era. She booked a very good facelift, lied about her age for the next four decades and started another phase of her career. After moving to Malibu and working a stint on the hit soap Peyton Place, offers started to flood in, particularly from liberal and leftwing film-makers, who “were stumbling over each other to give me work. Me first, me first! And they were artists, and brilliant.” She met Joe, 12 years her junior, and the opposite of her domineering first husband: “This really cute boy, and so dear, and so in love. A working-class Italian non-intellectual. It was like the biggest nourishment I could’ve had.”The greatest shift came, however, when Grant started to make documentaries. Before preparing for this interview, I had never seen any of them, but they are available on Amazon and I urge you to watch. They are staggeringly good. The first, made at the suggestion of Grant’s friend Mary Beth Yarrow, was about the Willmar Eight, a group of female bank tellers in a tiny town in Minnesota, who went on strike in 1977 after years of being paid a fraction of what their male colleagues earned. It is a deeply moving and shocking film – “A hell of a little piece that was really a calling card,” says Grant – and more were to follow, all for HBO. In 1986, Grant’s documentary Down and Out in America, in which she investigates the homeless and impoverished underbelly of Ronald Reagan’s America, won the Oscar for best documentary.What is striking about all her films is just how much she gets out of her subjects, who speak with an unselfconsciousness you no longer see on TV. Grant says much of this was down to her brilliant producers finding the right case studies. But her direction, and questioning, was a large part of it, too. In her 1989 film Battered, about domestic violence, she coaxes extraordinary testimony out of victims and perpetrators. One particular man, convicted of beating his wife, tells Grant how he can pick the one woman out of a hundred who is a soft target for abuse. “That’s the guy who stayed in my mind, too, that devil,” she says. “And he was attractive. Scary attractive. That was my first marriage! That guy who said I can come into a room and pick them out – that was me.”The Big Scary ‘S’ Word: why are people so terrified of socialism?Read moreGrant went on to make films about her old friend Sidney Poitier, and about Kirk Douglas and his family, and to strike a huge development deal with the US cable channel Lifetime. If she was shooting now, where would she look? “I would be fighting with HBO to let me go to Ukraine.” She thinks: “Or I’d be looking at Elon Musk, or at January 6th.”As it is, she says, “I’m old. I don’t look that old; I don’t feel that old, probably because I have a young husband – but …” In her memoir, she writes, “death makes me furious, which is a pity because I’m really up there myself”. But having survived all those waves of oppression in her youth, she isn’t done yet. “I feel there’s some way that I can still somehow do something. I don’t know what.” Experience makes her confident: something always turns up. “Life is like that. You slip to another place, go into another world, and you’re curious, and you take sides. And it’s a kind of miracle.”TopicsFilmDocumentary filmsFilm industryUS politicsinterviewsReuse 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

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      This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for Democrats

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      This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for Democrats Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns have made waves with tapes of Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans – but the president’s party has more to fear from what they revealThis Will Not Pass is a blockbuster. Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns deliver 473 pages of essential reading. The two New York Times reporters depict an enraged Republican party, besotted by and beholden to Donald Trump. They portray a Democratic party led by Joe Biden as, in equal measure, inept and out of touch.The Right review: conservatism, Trump, regret and wishful thinkingRead moreMartin and Burns make their case with breezy prose, interviews and plenty of receipts. After Kevin McCarthy denied having talked smack about Trump and the January 6 insurrection, Martin appeared on MSNBC with tapes to show the House Republican leader lied.In Burns and Martin’s pages, Trump attributes McCarthy’s cravenness to an “inferiority complex”. The would-be speaker’s spinelessness and obsequiousness are recurring themes, along with the Democrats’ political vertigo.On election day 2020, the country simply sought to restore a modicum of normalcy. Nothing else. Even as Biden racked up a 7m-vote plurality, Republicans gained 16 House seats. There was no mandate. Think checks, balances and plenty of fear.Biden owes his job to suburban moms and dads, not the woke. As the liberal Brookings Institution put it in a post-election report, “Biden’s victory came from the suburbs”.Said differently, the label of socialism, the reality of rising crime, a clamor for open borders and demands for defunding the police almost cost Democrats the presidency. As a senator, Biden knew culture mattered. Whether his party has internalized any lessons, though, is doubtful.On election day 2021, the party lost the Virginia governor’s mansion. Republican attacks over critical race theory and Covid-driven school closures and Democrats’ wariness over parental involvement in education did them in. This year, the midterms offer few encouraging signs.This Will Not Pass portrays Biden as dedicated to his belief his presidency ought to be transformational. In competition with the legacy of Barack Obama, he yearns for comparison to FDR.“I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his,” Biden reportedly told one adviser.Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, is more blunt: “Obama is jealous of Biden.”Then again, Hunter Biden is not the Obamas’ son. Michelle and Barack can’t be too jealous.A telephone conversation between Biden and Abigail Spanberger, a moderate congresswoman from Virginia, captures the president’s self-perception. “This is President Roosevelt,” he begins, following up by thanking Spanberger for her sense of humor.She replies: “I’m glad you have a sense of humor, Mr President.”Spanberger represents a swing district, is a former member of the intelligence community and was a driving force in both Trump impeachments.This Will Not Pass also amplifies the disdain senior Democrats hold for the “Squad”, those members of the Democratic left wing who cluster round Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.Martin and Burns quote Steve Ricchetti, a Biden counselor: “The problem with the left … is that they don’t understand that they lost.”Cedric Richmond, a senior Biden adviser and former dean of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), is less diplomatic. He describes the squad as “fucking idiots”. Richmond also takes exception to AOC pushing back at the vice-president, Kamala Harris, for telling undocumented migrants “do not come.”“AOC’s hit on Kamala was despicable,” Richmond says. “What it did for me is show a clear misunderstanding of what’s going on in the world.”Meanwhile, Cori Bush, a Squad member, has picked a fight with the CBC and led the charge against domestic terror legislation.Burns and Martin deliver vivid portraits of DC suck-ups and screw-ups. They capture Lindsey Graham, the oleaginous senior senator from South Carolina, in all his self-abasing glory.During the authors’ interview with Trump, Graham called the former president. After initially declining to pick up, Trump answered. “Hello, Lindsey.” He then placed Graham on speaker, without letting him know reporters were seated nearby.Groveling began instantly. Graham praised the power of Trump’s endorsements and the potency of his golf game. Stormy Daniels would not have been impressed. The senator, Burns and Martin write, sounded like “nothing more than an actor in a diet-fad commercial who tells his credulous viewer that he had been skeptical of the glorious product – until he tried it”.This Will Not Pass also attempts to do justice to Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator and “former Green party activist who reinvented herself as Fortune 500-loving moderate”. In addition to helping block Biden’s domestic agenda, Sinema has a knack for performative behavior and close ties to Republicans.Like Sarah Palin, she is fond of her own physique. The senator “boasted knowingly to colleagues and aides that her cleavage had an extraordinary persuasive effect on the uptight men of the GOP”.Palin is running to represent Alaska in Congress. Truly, we are blessed.Subtitled Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, Burns and Martin’s book closes with a meditation on the state of US democracy. The authors are anxious. Trump has not left the stage. Republican leadership has bent the knee. Mitch McConnell wants to be Senate majority leader again. He knows what the base is thinking and saying. Marjorie Taylor Greene is far from a one-person minority.Martin and Burns quote Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia: “You know that great line that you hear all the time: ‘This is not us. This is not America.’ You know what? It is, actually.”The Republicans are ahead on the generic ballot, poised to regain House and Senate. Biden’s favorability is under water. Pitted against Trump, he struggles to stay even. His handling of Russia’s war on Ukraine has not moved the needle.Inflation dominates the concerns of most Americans. For the first time in two years, the economy contracts. It is a long time to November 2024. Things can always get worse.
      This Will Not Pass is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsJoe BidenBiden administrationDonald TrumpUS elections 2024reviewsReuse this content More

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      The Right review: conservatism, Trump, regret and wishful thinking

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      The Right review: conservatism, Trump, regret and wishful thinkingMatthew Continetti’s history of 100 years of the American right is ambitious, impressive and worrying America’s tribes frequently clash but they rarely intersect. Over the past 60 years, the Democratic party has morphed into an upstairs-downstairs coalition, graduate-degree holders tethered to an urban core and religious “nones”. Meanwhile, Republicans have grown more rural, southern, evangelical and working class.Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow Read moreWithin the GOP, Donald Trump has supplanted the legacies of Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. According to Matthew Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, being a conservative in 2022 is less about advocating limited government and more about culture wars, owning the libs and denouncing globalization.Subtitled The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, Continetti’s third book examines a century of intellectual and political battles. He seeks to explain how Trumpism became the dominant force within the Republican party. In large measure, he succeeds.The Right is readable and relatable, well-written and engaging. The author’s command of facts is impressive. For decades, he has lived around and within the conservative ecosystem.Continetti chronicles the tumult of 1960s, the emergence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” and the migration of blue-collar ethnic Catholics to what was once the home of the white Protestant establishment. He also looks back, at the pre-New Deal Republican party and at conservatism after the civil war.Continetti is sensitive to the currents that swirl in and around this country and its people. He laments that in the 21st century blood, soil and grievance have overtaken the conservative orthodoxies of free markets, personal autonomy and communal virtue. He is discomforted by how contemporary conservatism acquired a performative edge.On the page, his dismay is muted but present. He wistfully recalls the collapse of the Weekly Standard, where he worked for Bill Kristol, his future father-in-law. George W Bush’s war in Iraq was one thing that helped do-in the magazine.Similarly, the Republican establishment’s call for immigration reform left many Americans feeling unwanted and threatened. The US immigrant population hovers near a record high, almost 14%. More than 44 million people living here were born elsewhere. Even before the pandemic, the fertility rate hit a record low. The populist impulse is not going to disappear.Trump’s inaugural address, replete with images of “American carnage”, is illustrative of the new conservative normal. Continetti quotes George W Bush: “That was some weird shit.” Nonetheless, on 20 January 2017, Trump struck a nerve.Continetti is mindful of broader trends, and the havoc assortative marriage has brought to society and politics. On that point, he gives Charles Murray his due. Continetti is pessimistic. Marriage predicated upon educational attainment has helped concentrate intellectual capital and financial advantage within a narrow caste.Twenty years ago, David Brooks, once Continetti’s colleague, described an idyllic urban existence, Bobos in Paradise. Those who can’t get in, however, face life in purgatory. The meritocracy got what it clamored for, only to discover it wasn’t loved by those it left behind.Continetti seemingly attempts to downplay similarities between Trump’s Maga movement and the hard-right in Europe. He omits all reference to Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine le Pen in France. Farage led Britain to Brexit and made a cameo appearance in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the US. Le Pen twice forced Emmanuel Macron into a run-off for president.On the other hand, Continetti does capture how part of the US right adores Vladimir Putin: his authoritarianism, his unbridled nationalism, his disdain for classic liberalism.“Putin held the same allure for the national populist right that Che Guevara held for the cold war left,” Continetti writes. “No wonder President Trump was a fan of the Russian autocrat.”Continetti also says conservatism “anchored to Trump the man will face insurmountable obstacles in attaining policy coherence, government competence, and intellectual credibility”. Here, he stands on shaky ground.In 2016, Trump assembled a winning coalition and beat Hillary Clinton. In power, he loaded the federal judiciary. Whether Jeb Bush could have replicated such success is doubtful. As for intellectual credibility, in 2008 Kristol, Continetti’s mentor, helped pluck Sarah Palin from obscurity. And we all know where that led.In 2009, Continetti himself wrote The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star. He now says “attacks on Palin” caused him “to rally to her defense”. Intellectual slumming, more like it. Palin was unfit for the top job. She resigned as Alaska governor 18 months before her term expired.Continetti also argues that conservatism needs once again to embrace the Declaration of Independence, the constitution and the Bill of Rights.“One cannot be an American patriot without reverence for the nation’s enabling documents,” he says.January 6 demonstrates otherwise. Conservatism’s commitment to democracy and the constitution appears situational. Members of the conservative establishment provided intellectual sinew for America’s Caesar. It wasn’t just about Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and folks dressed as Vikings.The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of historyRead moreJohn Eastman, a former clerk to Clarence Thomas; Ted Cruz, a former clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist; Mike Lee, son of Rex Lee, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. Together with Ginni Thomas, the justice’s wife, they played outsized roles around the Capitol attack. Fifteen months later, Eastman is in legal jeopardy, Cruz is under growing suspicion and Lee looks like a weasel. Ms Thomas merits our scorn.The reckoning Continetti hopes for may never arrive. Gas prices surge. Crime rises. Together, they portend a Republican midterm landslide. Such realities ushered in Reagan’s 1980 landslide over Jimmy Carter.A one-term Biden presidency looms. A second Trump term is a real possibility. The latest revelations surrounding Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell teach us that inconvenient truths are quickly discarded. In politics, a win is a win.
      The Right is published in the US by Basic Books
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsUS CongressDonald TrumpRepublicansThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      Convergent Conversation – In fact VR is Possible, Bill!

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      ‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knows

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      Interview‘A PhD in my brother’: Valerie Biden Owens on the Joe she knowsDavid Smith in Washington In her newly published memoir, Growing Up Biden, the president’s sister pays tribute in a moving portrait of sibling loveWho wouldn’t want Valerie Biden Owens in their corner? The first sister of the United States gives no inch in defending her big brother. Asked about Joe Biden’s notorious gaffes, for example, she simply rejects the premise.Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow Read more“He doesn’t have gaffes,” she insists. “He speaks the truth. Like, hello, surprise, I just said what was true!”At the end of a carefully crafted speech last month in Warsaw, Poland, the president ad libbed that Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, “cannot remain in power”. To the world’s media it was a howler implying regime change that upended weeks of diplomacy and sent aides scrambling.To Biden Owens, however, it was truth-telling after meeting refugee mothers and children.“This is a man, you see what you get,” she says, with recognisable flintiness. “His wife died. Two of his children died, one by a long death and one by a sudden death. And one almost from addiction. He was speaking from his heart. What kind of man [Putin] does this? That’s the real Joe Biden. That was not a gaffe.”Biden Owens, 76, is talking about her newly published memoir. Growing Up Biden is a lucid account of a middle-class childhood remarkable only for its ordinariness, becoming the first woman in US history to run a presidential campaign, and helping “Joey” emerge from personal and political disasters to reach his own mountaintop.It is also a moving portrait of sibling love. Joe is the oldest of four Biden children. Valerie was born three years later, followed by Jimmy and Frank.“At an age when a lot of other older brothers pretended they didn’t even know their sister, Joey took me everywhere with him,” she writes. “When his friends would ask, ‘Why did you bring a girl?’ he answered, ‘She’s not a girl. She’s my sister. If you want me around, she’s going to be around, too.’”Family life began in Scranton, Pennsylvania but work dried up for Joe Biden Sr, who found opportunities in Delaware, cleaning boilers and selling cars. The Bidens moved to a two-bedroom apartment there when Joe was 10.Valerie’s book does not dwell long on her brother’s childhood stutter but, via Zoom from her home in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, she elaborates.“I don’t remember as a little girl that he stuttered; he was just my big brother. But as I got older then I saw that he was a stutterer. I could hear it and I was aware that he was made fun of and that he was made to feel less and put in a corner.“When you’ve been bullied, you have two ways to go: you can become a bully yourself or you can realise that we’re all in this together and there’s more to life than kicking somebody who’s down. So my brother, layer by thin layer, developed a backbone of steel and determined that he was not going to be defined by a bully.”How did their parents react to it?“Contrary to what he had incoming – because he stuttered, he was stupid – my mother said, ‘Oh no, Joey, it’s because you are so smart, you can’t get the words out fast enough’. So my mother gave him confidence. When a person stutters the natural inclination is to jump in and say the word for them but we didn’t do that.”Joe spent hours alone in front of a mirror, reciting Irish poetry. “He spit the stutter out. He worked at it. In the end, adversity builds character. My brother turned out to be the man that he is with such great empathy because he was a stutterer, so that turned out to be one of his best gifts in hindsight.”Joe worked as a lawyer, joined the county council and became known in Democratic politics in Delaware. Fifty years ago last month, he announced that he would challenge a popular incumbent for a US Senate seat. Valerie, a 26-year-old high school teacher, ran his long-shot election bid.It must have been hard going, in a year that would produce campaign accounts with titles such as The Boys on the Bus?She reflects: “Politics was a boys’ club. Women in in the 1970s and through that period only opened and closed headquarters and got coffee and ordered the paper.“There were few women candidates. There were no women consultants or women campaign managers or even women journalists with rare exceptions. It was a brand new world for a woman but I had it a lot easier than a lot of women because my brother pulled up a chair for me at the table of all men and said, ‘This is my sister. She speaks for me. She’s the boss. What she says goes, nothing passes through or gets out of here unless she approves.’“It wasn’t because I was such a brilliant campaign strategist because I had never met a campaign manager before – nor had Joe and I really ever met a United States senator before. It was because I had a PhD in my brother. I knew Delaware, I knew my brother, I knew what the issues were and I knew how we wanted to present what we stood for and I knew how to listen to the people in Delaware who told us what they needed.“I had it easier until Joe left the room and then there were always doubters who looked at me as either the token relative or the token sister. But I was raised with a wonderful, decent man who was my father and three brothers, so I was not intimidated by men. I enjoyed them and I realised we’ve got to work together.”Biden won that first election by 3,163 votes, or less than 1.5%. Six weeks later, his wife Neilia and baby daughter, Naomi, were killed when their car collided with a tractor trailer. His sons, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured but survived.His sister’s most vivid memory of that day is the clack, clack, clack sound of hers and Joe’s heels as they hurried through the marble hallway of the US Capitol minutes after getting the call from their brother Jimmy. She writes: “Joe turned to me, eyes stricken, voice choked. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I remember his eyes. I wish I didn’t. Staring into them at that moment was like staring straight into hell.”She adds now: “My mom always said the eyes are the windows of the soul and I was looking into two dark, dark spaces, because he knew. It was horrible.“On 7 November, my brother was the too-young-to-serve newly elected senator from Delaware, 29 years old, the hope of the future of the Democratic party, had a beautiful wife, three magnificent children, and six weeks later the whole world turned on its axis. He was a young man whose heart had been ripped out. A young widower.“Life has a way of interrupting. You think you’re in control and then, bam. My dad said that’s when you’ve got to get up and keep moving. Joe had to get up because he had Beau and Hunter, his two sons, who were just ready to turn three and four years old, so he had a purpose.”Valerie moved in and helped raise the boys. She also guided Joe – who married Jill Jacobs in 1977 – to six more Senate terms, although they fared less well running for the White House. In the 1987 presidential campaign, he was accused of plagiarism after quoting the British politician Neil Kinnock but forgetting to credit him.Biden Owens recalls: “The whole incident of Neil Kinnock hurt me a lot personally because it went after my brother’s character and it was a slip of the tongue of omission. Joe should have said it and he didn’t and so he took the hit for it.”Joe ran a short campaign for the 2008 nomination but after eight years as Barack Obama’s vice-president he opted not to run in 2016. His sister suggests this had more to do with another tragedy, the death of his 46-year-old son, Beau, from brain cancer than discouragement from Obama.“We wanted to run for president but my brother hadn’t had time to heal and the way that we heal is as a family. What choice is there: to be with your son who you know has been given a death sentence or be out talking to the primary voters in New Hampshire? Just no choice. You have to go through a period of grief and mourning. Every person does it differently but the presidency was not on the cards for us.”‘Swings and misses’Joe wears Beau’s rosary on his left wrist every day. His sister insists that loss upon loss has not shaken their faith in God’s existence.“For me, being a Catholic is a package and, if you believe in the afterlife, it still is pretty hard. Particularly when Beau died, I remember yelling, ‘Why God, what possible good could come from this?’ It was a heart wrenching cry.“A friend of mine said to me maybe it’s because where he is now, he’ll be able to do even more good than were he with you on Earth. It gave me pause because it’s part of the story of the resurrection and life after death. I didn’t lose my faith because I, Valerie Biden Owens, need something bigger to hold on to than herself.”It looked like the end of the road for Joe’s political ambitions. But then, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump and the sight of white nationalists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, galvanised Biden for one more bid. Yet again, there was a rocky start.At a Democratic debate in Miami in June 2019, the California senator Kamala Harris challenged Biden’s opposition to mandatory desegregation busing in the 1970s, telling the story of a girl who was part of schools’ racial integration and ending with dramatic effect: “That little girl was me.”Biden Owens was not impressed. “Being a campaign manager, I know sometimes your candidate swings and misses. That was a swing and a miss and certainly it was not an accurate representation but it was a campaign. Immediately in the fallout, it was clear that was not a smack to Joe.”Biden went on to win the primary with significant support from Black voters. Bearing no grudge, he picked Harris as his running mate. His sister adds: “Look, my brother’s a smart man. He had been vice-president and he knew what it took and what he needed as his partner, and he chose her. So it all was OK.”This time the campaign was managed by Greg Schultz and then Jen O’Malley Dillon, with Valerie as adviser. She admits she had been hesitant about her brother running because Trump was sure to launch vulgar and dishonest attacks on the family.Sure enough, Republicans obsessed over Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, which included high-paid consultancies and gifts, alleging without evidence that Joe abused the vice-presidency to enrich his son. There is still a frenzy over emails and photos found on a laptop abandoned by Hunter at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. Hunter did confirm that he was under federal investigation over a tax matter. He also wrote a memoir of his struggles with addiction.His aunt does not watch the rightwing media onslaught. “It’s been the same story for four years,” she says. “There’s nothing new. It’s the same one, same one, same one, same one. And by the way, the president has never been accused of any indication that he’s done anything wrong.“It’s the same accusations they’re dishing out. If that’s how they hope to win as opposed to anything that’s positive, what the hell difference does that make to the ordinary American who’s worried about food or medicine and education for their child? Who cares? Talk about something that matters, Republican party. Step up to the plate. Help middle-class America.”Perhaps voters agree. The attacks on Hunter never quite stuck like the “Lock her up!” attacks on Clinton. Biden won the White House, promising to heal “the soul of America” after four years of American carnage.There have been accomplishments for sure – a coronavirus relief package, a record 7.9m jobs created, a $1tn infrastructure law and a reassertion of America on the global stage – but disappointments persist on the climate crisis, police reform and voting rights in a Congress where Democrats’ majority is wafer-thin.Biden Owens reflects: “What I think was mom’s most profound statement was ‘beware the righteous’ and we’ve got them on the right and we have them on the left equally now. I don’t know how these men and women in Congress are married, how they stay married. Compromise is not a dirty word. It doesn’t mean giving up your principles; it means rubbing off those rough edges.“It’s been a very difficult time and we’re all just trying to keep our head above water. But when you look at what Joe’s done – more jobs, more judges, more diversity, first woman vice-president, first African American woman on the [supreme court] bench – Joe remembers his roots. He’s a middle-class, ordinary American who had opportunities to do an extraordinary thing, becoming president. He’s got his eye on the ball, which is middle class America.”‘All Republicans aren’t bad guys’The president has been criticised, however, for relying on an old operating system in which compromise was possible and failing to recognise that today’s Republican party has embraced Trump’s authoritarianism and lies.“What puzzles me is this: what happened to Lindsey Graham?” Biden Owens writes, referring to the Republican senator for South Carolina. “After John McCain died, perhaps a part of Senator Graham’s soul died as well. The man is unrecognisable to me.”She elaborates via Zoom: “I don’t know Lindsey Graham well but, to me, the good guy, the decent person, a large portion of that left him. The Republican party has become a party of a personality cult.‘All these men’: Jill Biden resented Joe’s advisers who pushed White House runRead more“All Republicans aren’t bad guys and there are good men and women who are Republicans and God bless them because that’s what we got to do to keep our democracy working. But the kissing the ring of the former president, I don’t understand it. It’s there and it’s something to be dealt with. But I have hope that the good men and women will stop this slide.”Valerie, who is married to Jack Owens, a lawyer and businessman, and has three children, says her brother will run again in 2024 and the question of his age – he turns 80 this year – is for the voters to decide. Early in her book, she reflects matter-of-factly that she lived the first 40 years of her public adult life in his shadow.Does she have any regrets – and wonder, perhaps, if she could have been President Biden? She quotes the novelist Edith Wharton: “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”She explains: “That’s me and Joe. Sometimes he was the candle, sometimes I was the mirror, but it also flipped. My light was never snuffed out. My life was doing what I wanted to do and what I could do best. I could talk about Joe Biden much better than Joe Biden could talk about Joe Biden.“People could take the measure of the man or not and he got to do what he did best, which was go out, listen to the voters, tell what he was about and be the best Joe Biden that he could be. So no, it was a wonderful partnership and I wouldn’t have changed it.”
      Growing Up Biden is published in the US by Celadon
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