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      Martin Luther King, founding father: Jonathan Eig on his epic new biography

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      Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin Luther King Jr was only published last week but it has already been hailed by the Washington Post as “the most compelling account of King’s life in a generation”. The documentarian Ken Burns described it as “kind of a miracle” and the New York Times declared it “supplants David J Garrow’s [Pulitzer-winning] 1986 biography, Bearing the Cross, as the definitive life of King”.In a remarkable act of generosity, Garrow opened his files to Eig and acted as his consultant. Garrow now agrees with other critics, calling Eig’s book “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” and “the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years”.Eig is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written five other highly regarded books, including bestselling biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali. This week, Eig chatted about how his book on King came about and what he hopes readers will take from it.The Guardian: I read somewhere that the new book came out of your work on Ali.Eig: Yeah, it was completely organic. I was interviewing people who knew both of them and every time they would start talking about King, I would just get more curious. So I felt like I already had their phone numbers. I could call them back and get another meeting and this time talk about King. And I could do that before they got any older.The Guardian: When I wrote The Gay Metropolis I started with the oldest people I could find. Did you do that?Eig: 100%. It was like actuarial tables: factor for age and health and go after those who are the most frail. I hate to be crude about it, but that’s exactly what I did. Basically I was calling everybody all at once.The Guardian: How long did this one take?Eig: This one was six years. That’s full-time work, like 60 hours a week for six years.The Guardian: You had access to thousands of FBI files that weren’t available to previous biographers. How did that come about?Eig: I got somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 new documents. Donald Trump signed an order to release documents that were gathered during congressional hearings on JFK’s assassination. And I think accidentally that also led to the release of all the MLK FBI stuff, because the Church committee [a 1975-76 Senate panel on government intelligence activities] investigated them both.I really think Dave Garrow was the only one who went through every file. I went through a lot of them and Garrow was kind of like the first reader and he would tell me what was important and I, of course, looked through a lot on my own. But I don’t really know that too many other people were out there looking at this stuff.The Guardian: You did more than 200 interviews. Why were there so many people who knew King who were much more forthcoming than they had been before?Eig: Because they were older and because Coretta [Scott King, King’s wife] was gone. They were more comfortable saying things that they wouldn’t have said before. Certainly when it came to talking about Dorothy Cotton [one of King’s mistresses], people were really reluctant to say anything while Coretta was alive.The Guardian: I always tell my young friends writing a great book is all about what you leave out. Do you agree?Eig: (chuckling) Yeah. Even at 600-something pages! I left out a lot. At one point – I’ll be honest – I asked Colin Dickerman [his original editor] if I could do a three-volume work. I wanted to do one from childhood to Montgomery and then from Montgomery to maybe Selma and then Selma to death. Wisely, Colin disabused me of that idea. I’m trying to give the reader not just a good book but a readable book. I told my wife, I want people to cry at the end of this book – and they’re not gonna cry if I’ve put them to sleep!The Guardian: What do you know now that you didn’t know when you wrote your first book, about Lou Gehrig?Eig: It took me a couple of books to figure out that journalists’ archives are really valuable … When you find a good interview a journalist did with one of your subjects, go to his archives and see if the notes are there, see if the tapes are there.I got David Halberstam’s notes from his interview with King and he describes King taking his kids to the swimming pool and his daughter falls and scrapes her knee. And King grabs a piece of fried chicken and rubs it on her knee and says, “You know, chicken is the best thing for a cut.” It’s just a sweet little moment that didn’t make Halberstam’s story. But it was in his notebook.The Guardian: You describe King as one of America’s founding fathers. I’d never seen that before.Eig: Yeah. It was my idea. It was inspired somewhat by reading some of the 1619 Project. They talk about the idea that Black activists were seeking to force the country to live up to the words of the founding fathers. And that’s what kind of triggered it for me. I think you can make an argument that King more than anyone else is a founding father. He’s trying to create the nation as it was meant to be.The Guardian: The great Texas journalist Molly Ivins said something similar: “There’s not a thing wrong with the ideals and mechanisms outlined and the liberties set forth in the constitution of the US. The only problem is the founders left a lot of people out of the constitution. They left out poor people and Black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our constitution to everyone in America.”Eig: Yeah, I, I like that.The Guardian: What would you most like people to feel from reading your book?Eig: I hope people see King as a human being and not this two-dimensional character we’ve made him into since he became a national holiday and monument. [They should know] he had feelings and suffered and struggled and had doubts, because I think that makes his heroism even greater.I certainly want people to appreciate just how radical he was. A lot of people reduce him to this very safe figure who was all about peace, love and harmony. But he was challenging us in ways that made a lot of people uncomfortable, which is partly why the FBI came down on him the way they did.The Guardian: The thing that I think is probably most forgotten about him is that he was as anti-materialism as he was anti-militarism. Would you agree?Eig: That’s right. And it drove Coretta crazy because he would never even buy nice stuff for the house. And of course he left no money behind when he died. So he took it really seriously.
      King is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

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      ‘Trump’s not a good sport’: Chris Cillizza on presidents at play

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      From The Big Lebowski to Alice on The Brady Bunch, depictions of bowling abound in American pop culture. The sport’s real-life adherents included Richard Nixon, who installed bowling lanes in the White House and was known to play between seven to 12 games late at night. Characteristically, he played alone. This is one of many athletic accounts from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a new book, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency, by the longtime political journalist Chris Cillizza.Bowling solo personified “Nixon the loner”, Cillizza says. “He didn’t play tennis or golf with friends. He did enjoy bowling by himself. It’s a powerful image, a telling image.”Tricky Dick’s love of bowling also helped with a crucial voting bloc: “Nixon viewed it as the sport of the Silent Majority – white, blue-collar men who sort of made up his base. He was very aware of this.”A Washington journalist for four decades, most recently for CNN, Cillizza pitched the book as about “the sports presidents play, love, spectate, and what it tells us about who they are and how they govern. That was the germ of the idea, the seed going in.”Power Players surveys 13 presidents of the modern era, from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Some of its narratives are well-known – think Ike’s extensive golf-playing, John F Kennedy’s touch football games or Barack Obama’s pickup basketball on the campaign trail. The book explores less-remembered sides of these stories, including a scary moment on the links for Eisenhower.While golfing in Colorado in 1955, he fielded multiple stressful phone calls from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After eating a hamburger with onions and getting yet another call from Dulles, Ike felt too angry to keep playing. Chest pains followed that night. The White House initially claimed indigestion but an electrocardiogram found something more serious – a heart attack. At the time, there was no 25th amendment specifying the chain of command if a president became incapacitated. Fortunately, Ike never lost consciousness during the episode.Golf was a popular sport for many presidents, as reflected in a previous book about White House athletics, First Off the Tee by Don Van Natta Jr, whom Cillizza interviewed. Yet the list of presidential pastimes is long and diverse, from Nixon’s bowling to Jimmy Carter’s fly fishing to George HW Bush’s horseshoes. Yes, horseshoes. In addition to Bush’s well-known prowess on the Yale University baseball team, he was a pretty good horseshoes player who established his own league in the White House, with a commissioner and tournaments. The White House permanent staff fielded teams; Queen Elizabeth II even gifted Bush a quartet of silver horseshoes.In the greatest-presidential-athlete discussion, Cillizza lands in Gerald Ford’s corner.“No debate, he’s the best athlete ever, I think, with [George HW] Bush a distant second, among modern presidents.”Ford sometimes lived up to the bumbling stereotypes made famous by Chevy Chase and Bob Hope – including when he accidentally hit people with golf balls. Yet he was an All-American center on the national-champion University of Michigan football team and received contract offers from two NFL squads, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.In addition to the sports presidents play, Cillizza’s book examines how presidents use sports to connect to the public.Calling sports “a common language that lots and lots and lots of Americans speak”, Cillizza says: “I think politicians are forever trying to identify with the average person … I think sports is a way into that world for a lot of presidents.”There’s the practice of inviting championship teams to the White House, which Cillizza traces to Ronald Reagan, although instances date back decades. While not much of a sports fan, Reagan came from a sports radio background, played the legendary Gipper in the film Knute Rockne, All American and understood the importance of proximity to winners, Cillizza says.There’s also the tradition of presidential first pitches at baseball games, arguably the most iconic thrown by George W Bush at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Cillizza notes Dubya’s baseball pedigree as president of the Texas Rangers, and that he reportedly contemplated becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball.Of the presidents surveyed, Cillizza says George HW Bush had the most sportsmanship, thanks to early lessons about fair play from his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, a strong tennis player herself. The least sportsmanlike, according to the author? Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump. Cillizza cites an account of Trump’s time on the Fordham University squash team. After a loss to the Naval Academy, he drove to a department store and bought golf equipment. He and his teammates vented their frustration by hitting golf balls off a bluff into the Chesapeake Bay, then drove away, sans clubs.“That’s Trump, in a lot of ways,” Cillizza says. “He’s not a good sport who’s going to be genteel.”The author notes similar behavior throughout Trump’s career, including bombastic performances in World Wrestling Entertainment storylines and a whole recent book about his alleged cheating at golf, as well as a recent news item about the former president going to Ireland to visit one of his courses.“He hit a drive, and said Joe Biden could never do this,” Cillizza recalls. “It went 280ft right down the middle of the fairway. He talks about his virility, his health, through the lens of sports.”Not too long ago, two ex-presidents from rival parties teamed up as part of a golf foursome. George HW Bush joined the man who beat him in 1992 – Bill Clinton – en route to an unlikely friendship. Rounding out the foursome were the broadcasting legend Jim Nantz and NFL superstar Tom Brady.“It’s remarkable what sports can do to bring presidents together,” Cillizza says. “This day and age, it’s hard to consider … I don’t think Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be playing golf together anytime soon.”
      Power Players is published in the US by Twelve More

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      ‘I wish he had finished his book’: Chad L Williams on WEB Du Bois

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      Chad L Williams has written a brilliant biography of WEB Du Bois, a civil rights powerhouse widely regarded as America’s most important Black intellectual. Williams speaks and writes with a warmth and authority which have made him a star at Brandeis University, where he is the Samuel J and Augusta Spector professor of history and African and African American studies.The Guardian caught up with him just after he arrived in his hometown, San Francisco, where he was combining promotion for The Wounded World with a reunion with his sister and his parents, both retired attorneys.Williams lives in Needham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Madeleine Lopez, who directs the Center for Inclusive Excellence at Regis College, and their three children.“I thought I was going to go to law school but then I realized I didn’t want to be like my parents,” Williams said. “My first encounter with Du Bois was during my freshman year at UCLA, in a course on African American nationalism when I read [Du Bois’s 1903 classic] The Souls of Black Folks.“I was blown away. I remember not knowing what to make of this very strange book that had all of these powerful metaphors in it. It was really undefinable as far as discipline. It had history, sociology, philosophy, music. It is truly one of those timeless, classic books.“I started reading his other books like Black Reconstruction in America and really came to appreciate him as the most significant Black intellectual and scholar activist in American history.”To Williams, Du Bois was “singular” because of the sheer span of his life: “Ninety-five years; born in 1868 during the presidency of [Andrew] Johnson, during Reconstruction, he dies the day before the March on Washington, in Ghana in 1963. He really encapsulated the struggle for Black freedom and equality throughout the 20th century in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. I never thought I’d write a whole book about Du Bois. But yeah, it did happen.”Williams was a graduate student at Princeton when he first went to Amherst College, where most of Du Bois’s papers are in a library named in his honor. He saw a reference to “Du Bois world war I materials” and asked to see them.“I figured maybe I’ll get a couple of folders and [the librarian] returned with six microfilm reels. And I think, ‘What could this possibly be?’ I load this first reel and I see this manuscript which I knew nothing about. It was over 800 pages long. In addition to the manuscript, all of his research materials and all of his correspondence related to this book entitled The Black Man and the Wounded World.“He worked on it for two decades and no scholar had ever talked about it. I was stunned. This was this huge aspect of his life and career and scholarship which had been overlooked. From that moment I was hooked on understanding it. It would have been the definitive history of [Black soldiers] in world war I and one of Du Bois’s most significant works of scholarship – but he never completed it.”I asked if Williams identified with Du Bois’s seminal idea of double consciousness in every Black American, and how it related to the unfinished work on the war: “Did it mean anything to you as a Black man?”“I think not. Not initially. When I first read The Souls of Black Folk I was really just trying to understand who Du Bois was and what this book was about.”But soon, Williams began to reread the book every year. As he learned more about African American history, he “came to appreciate the significance of Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness. And subsequently began to think about it just in terms of my own racial identity.“But it’s such a powerful metaphor and I really think it sits at the heart of my book, in terms of why Du Bois supported world war I, and how he felt that the war was an opportunity to reconcile that double consciousness that Black people faced. This tension that he described, of being Black on the one hand and being American on the other, this was the opportunity to put that theory into practice and to test it.“He genuinely thought those warring ideals he talked about could be reconciled … and he genuinely believed the war could serve as that opportunity. And ultimately he was wrong.”Du Bois fought for the creation of a Black officer corps, even though he had to accept segregated training. When he got to France, to interview Black soldiers, he was appalled by what he learned.“This is the beginning of him working on his book conducting research and also reckoning with the failed expectations of the war. He was genuinely taken aback by the racism that he was exposed to and Black soldiers told him about.”White officers spread the libel Black soldiers were raping French women. French mayors told Du Bois Black soldiers were much better behaved than white.“Getting the first-hand accounts from all these mayors was really important. And when he publishes them in [the NAACP magazine] the Crisis it’s an incredibly bold act, going directly against the narrative the government and the army are putting out about Black troops” being well treated.Like most great books, The Wounded World is a tribute to persistence. Williams worked on it for 12 years but he started thinking about it when he discovered Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript, 23 years ago.“One of the things that I think us writers can appreciate … is howdifficult it is to write a book,” Williams said. “I wish Du Bois had finished his book. But I can empathize with him. It’s not easy, even when it’s the great Du Bois, who wrote 22 other books.”
      The Wounded World: WEB Du Bois and the First World War is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      The Wounded World review: brilliant biography of WEB Du Bois at war

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      My favorite kind of history makes you feel you are living inside every moment the author creates. This can only happen when the fruits of rigorous research are assembled with the flair of a novelist. Chad L Williams, a Brandeis professor, does all that and more in his riveting new biography of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.The first Black man to earn a Harvard PhD, Du Bois’s passion and thoughtfulness still make him America’s most important Black intellectual. Besides his brilliance, he never shied away from friction: another useful quality for any good biographer.Williams’s focus is Du Bois’s role in the first world war and the book about it which preoccupied him for many years, though he never managed to publish it. But Williams also includes the most important details of Du Bois’s life before and long after.One of the many pleasures of this volume is that author and subject are equally interesting writers.Du Bois established himself as a thoughtful radical and eager combatant with The Souls of Black Folk, an essay collection published in 1903, into which Williams says he poured “all his brilliance and anguish”. Combining “philosophical clairvoyance, historical audacity, literary imagination, sociological precision, autobiographical introspection, political urgency, musical lyricism, and poetic emotion”, it was “a text that defied classification”.It also made Du Bois a declared enemy of Booker T Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington pleased white supremacists by declaring that “in all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers”. Williams writes that Du Bois portrayed his rival as anointed by white capitalists “North and South to legitimize the social, political and economic marginalization of the race”.It was here that Du Bois offered one of his first famous insights: the color line endowed Black Americans with the peculiar sensation of “double consciousness”. This was the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity … One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”Williams discovered Souls as an undergraduate. It has been a touchstone ever since. The “dogged strength” of African Americans forms the spine of this biography.Six years after publishing his foundational volume, Du Bois became a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he was director of research and, most importantly, editor of its monthly magazine, the Crisis. This gave him a direct line into the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of African Americans, for 24 years beginning in 1910.In 1915, Du Bois correctly identified the Great War as proof that “European civilization has failed”. But he also believed the loyalties of people of color had to lie with England, France and Belgium, despite their terrible colonial records, because a triumph by Germany would be the worst possible outcome.Du Bois used his pulpit at the Crisis to celebrate the role of Black Africans fighting for France, photos of the tirailleurs sénégalais carrying arresting captions like: “Black soldiers from Senegal fighting to protect the civilization of Europe from itself.”When Woodrow Wilson led America into battle in 1917, Du Bois was fiercely anti-war: “It is an awful thing! It is Hell. It is the end of civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism.” But with what Williams calls “a mix of resignation, pragmatism, patriotism, and hope”, Du Bois supported entry, because he saw it as “an opportunity for African Americans to claim their full civic rights”.Du Bois clashed frequently with the NAACP board but he had a crucial ally in Joel Spingarn, the chairman. This was an early example of the Black-Jewish alliance which would be an important feature of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Spingarn enraged many Black newspapers when he advocated for a segregated training school for Black officers. But Du Bois agreed that, given the depths of prejudice, this was a necessary evil. He called the segregated facility “a temporary measure” designed to “FIGHT, not encourage discrimination in the army”.The secretary of war accepted the NAACP request. More than 1,000 Black officers were trained. But when Du Bois got himself a passport and passage to France, he discovered bigoted white officers making Black lives hell. They spread the libel that Black soldiers were raping vast numbers of French women. One colonel requested the removal of Black officers from his regiment, because they supposedly prevented the development of “mutual confidence and esprit de corps”. Black officers, Du Bois wrote, were disgusted by the “seemingly bottomless depths of American color hatred”.He surveyed French mayors, all over the country. Reports came back: Black Americans were treating French women with much greater respect than white American troops did. The entire 369th Infantry Regiment, the Black Rattlers from Harlem, embedded with the French army, received the Croix de Guerre.When the war was over, Du Bois and 5,000 others watched in awe as the French honored its troops of color with a gala celebration at the Palais du Trocadéro. The Théâtre-Français acted out “battlefield exploits of the colonial troops … and singers from the opera gave a rousing rendition” of the Marseillaise. The spectacle “surpassed any tribute to Black men” Du Bois “had ever seen”.I can only hint at the number of beguiling moments that fill the pages of this great book. The best part of this job is an occasional chance to celebrate great work. This gripping history is a cause for celebration.
      The Wounded World: WEB Du Bois and the First World War is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      ‘Excessive loyalty’: how Republican giant George Shultz fell for Nixon, Reagan … and Elizabeth Holmes

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      “Without Reagan the cold war would not have ended, but without Shultz, Reagan would not have ended the cold war.” This quotation of Mikhail Gorbachev – from the preface of In the Nation’s Service, a biography of George Shultz – now has a bittersweet taste. Reagan died in 2004, Shultz in 2021 (at 100) and Gorbachev in 2022. The cold war is having a renaissance that threatens the legacies of all three.Vladimir Putin has returned Russia to authoritarianism, suspended its participation in the last US-Russia arms control pact and, with the invasion of Ukraine, put the risk of catastrophic confrontation between major powers back on the table.This would have been heartbreaking for Shultz, a second world war veteran who as secretary of state was at Reagan’s side during the summits that ended the cold war. He was a statesman and Republican of the old school who endorsed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. He was also complicated.In the Nation’s Service, which Shultz authorised but did not control, portrays a man who loved not wisely. He was loyal to Richard Nixon during Watergate, loyal to Reagan during Iran-Contra, loyal to his party when it was cannibalised by Donald Trump and loyal to Elizabeth Holmes when Theranos, her blood-testing company, was exposed as a fraud.“It’s a thread through his life, excessive loyalty, and it grew out of his service in the marines in world war two, where obviously if you’re in combat your life depends on the loyalty and support of your comrades in the Marine Corps,” says the book’s author, Philip Taubman, a New York Times reporter and bureau chief in Moscow from 1985 to the end of 1988.“But as he carried that on through his life, it was a very strong impulse and so he stuck with Nixon too long.”Shultz, who studied at Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became dean of the University of Chicago, was Nixon’s labour secretary and led an effort to desegregate southern schools systems. He was the first director of the Office of Management and Budget before becoming treasury secretary.He resisted many of Nixon’s requests to use the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate his “enemies” but did give in to the demand to pursue Lawrence O’Brien, a top Democrat. The Watergate scandal engulfed the White House but Shultz did not resign until May 1974, three months before Nixon himself.Speaking at a Stanford University office in Washington, Taubman, 74, says: “I pressed him on this involvement in the Larry O’Brien investigation. I said, ‘I don’t understand how you allowed that to happen and why you didn’t resign at that point.’“His basic defence was he understood Nixon was involved in misconduct and he thought that had he resigned and Nixon had put someone else in the treasury secretary’s job, there would have been less of an obstacle for Nixon to use the IRS in punitive ways. It was a kind of self-congratulatory explanation. He clearly should have resigned before he did.”Reagan brought Shultz into his cabinet in 1982. Shultz hoped to ease cold war tensions but met with opposition from anti-Soviet ideologues.Taubman, who spent a decade writing the book, with exclusive access to papers including a secret diary maintained by an executive assistant, explains: “It was incredibly brutal. It was probably, if not the most ferocious infighting of any postwar American presidency, certainly one of the top two. He just ran into a buzzsaw.“The people around Reagan who set the tone for foreign policy in the first year … were hardliners on the Soviet Union. What they wanted to do was not contain the Soviet Union, which had been the American strategy since the end of the second world war. They wanted to roll back Soviet gains around the world and Soviet influence.”Shultz rarely got to meet Reagan one-on-one. “He was mystified by Reagan and he was puzzled and unsettled by the turmoil in the administration. For a guy who’d lived through the Nixon administration, you’d think he would have been a hardened internal combatant.“He would come back to his office and tell the aide who recorded all this in his diary, ‘I can’t get through to the president. How is it that the secretary of state can’t meet with the president of the United States to talk about US-Soviet relations?’ … It took several years before he and Reagan began to kind of connect.“One of the things that was clear, as I did the research, was just how disengaged Reagan was. There would be decisions taken that he would sign off on and then they would be reversed by people under him. It was incredibly chaotic and he wouldn’t grasp it by the lapels and say, ‘OK, I agree with George, this is what we’re going to do.’ He just let this turmoil fester until the second term.”In February 1983, history was given a helping hand when a blizzard forced Reagan to cancel a Camp David weekend. He and his wife, Nancy, invited Shultz and his wife to dinner. Shultz could see that for all his hot rhetoric about the “evil empire”, Reagan hoped to ease tensions with Russia.“If you’re looking for the key moments in the ending of the cold war,” Taubman says, “you have … the realisation among the two of them that they have in common a fundamental desire to wind down the cold war, the ascension of Gorbachev, his appointment of Eduard Shevardnadze as Soviet foreign minister, and the beginning of real negotiations over a huge range of issues: arms control; issues involving countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola where there was proxy fighting going on; human rights issues, which Reagan felt very strongly about, as did Shultz, which Gorbachev and his predecessors had resisted but Gorbachev eventually began to agree to discuss.”The capitalist Reagan and communist Gorbachev held their first meeting in Switzerland in 1985. Shultz went to Moscow to negotiate the terms of the summit and made sure the leaders kept talking in private. He was pivotal in making another summit happen in Iceland the following year.But again he was deferential to a fault, this time over Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.Taubman says: “Shultz completely understood that the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the space-based missile defence exotic technology, was unworkable but he wasn’t brought into the discussions until the last minute, just a few days before Reagan was going to give his speech about it on national television. He opposed it. He tried to get Reagan to back away.“When that failed, he tried to get Reagan to be less grandiose about the objectives – failed in all of that. Then … he got in line, saluted and supported it right through the summit in Reykjavik in 1986 where, had Reagan been more flexible about Star Wars, they might have achieved far-reaching arms control agreements. But Reagan wouldn’t give ground.”Gorbachev visited Washington in 1987 and signed a landmark deal to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Reagan went to Moscow in 1988. The tension drained out of the cold war and Shultz was “indispensable”, Taubman argues. “He was literally the diplomat-in-chief of the United States and he and Shevardnadze were the workers in the trenches who took the impulses of Gorbachev and Reagan and turned them into negotiations and then agreements.”But Shultz’s triumph was short-lived. “He was saddened when George HW Bush came into office because Jim Baker, the incoming secretary of state, and Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, decided Reagan and Shultz had gone too far too fast with Gorbachev. They put a pause in relations and that really annoyed Shultz and disappointed him.“He probably was somewhat hopeful under [Russian president Boris] Yeltsin, where things began to look more promising again. Then with Putin he was involved in so-called ‘track two’ diplomacy, where he and Henry Kissinger and some other former American officials would go to Moscow or Beijing and have consultations with Russian and Chinese leaders, talking about things that couldn’t be talked about in official diplomatic channels. He began to realise that Putin was taking Russia back into an authoritarian model.”Shultz’s loyalty was tested again when his beloved Republican party surrendered to Trump, who in 2017 became the first US president with no political or military experience. Trump’s “America first” mantra threatened alliances Shultz and others spent decades nurturing. Yet Shultz was reluctant to speak out.Taubman recalls: “I had a very tough interview with him about this because I knew he was no fan of Donald Trump and that he could see the Republican party was taking a dark turn. So I sat down with him and I said, ‘What are you going to say about Donald Trump? The election’s coming up. Do you feel any obligation to speak out publicly?’“He bobbed and weaved and didn’t really want to say anything and then eventually he said, ‘Henry Kissinger and I are talking about what, if anything, to say.’ A number of weeks later, they did say something. But being somewhat cynical, I’m afraid, I think it was calculated to have minimal impact. They issued a statement on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, which is notoriously a time when everyone’s gone home for the long weekend, saying, ‘We two Republican stalwarts do not plan to vote for either candidate.’“So that’s not bad … but they didn’t denounce Trump and they said, ‘We’re ready to serve if asked, not in an official position, but as an informal adviser to whomever gets elected.’ They sort of punted at that point before the election.“Trump comes into office and increasingly Shultz is concerned about the direction he’s going and the party’s going but he didn’t want to speak up publicly.”Taubman remembers a private meeting in San Francisco, where Trump came up.“Shultz pulls out of his pocket the text of a speech about immigration that Reagan had given, which was a fabulous, wholehearted endorsement of the role of immigrants in American history and how they had continually revitalised the country. He read that text to that group, I think, for as blunt a rebuff of Trump as he could muster at that time.“Then he spoke out later, critically of Trump’s foreign policy. But when all this crazy stuff went down in Ukraine and Rudy Giuliani, of all people, was over there trying to undermine the US ambassador, an outrageous intervention in American foreign policy, he said nothing about it at the time.“He was not unwilling to part company with the party and certainly with Trump but he never chose to take a public stand. I don’t know to this day whether he just didn’t want to anger the president. Probably to his dying day Shultz maintained a respect for the office. Maybe he was just too old to want to engage in a battle with the party and Trump. But there’s no question he and I had private conversations and thought the party had taken a dark turn.”Shultz took a position at Stanford but there was a sour postscript to his career. In his 90s, he threw his weight behind Holmes and her company, Theranos, which promised to revolutionise blood testing. He helped form a board, raised money and encouraged his grandson, Tyler Shultz, to work at the company.When Tyler took concerns about Holmes to the media, she set her lawyers on him and put him under surveillance. Shultz refused to cut ties with Holmes, causing a deep rift in the family. In 2018, Holmes was indicted on charges involving defrauding investors and deceiving patients and doctors. Last year, she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison.Taubman says: “I think, frankly, he fell in love with Elizabeth Holmes. It was not a physical relationship but I believe he was infatuated with her and she understood that and played on it in a calculating way.“She got him to do all kinds of things to help her put together her board of directors: Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, all kinds of senior national security officials, none of whom knew the first thing about biomedical issues. Then he played a major role in selling her to the media, and suddenly she’s on the cover of Fortune and Forbes. She’s the darling of Silicon Valley.“I learned … that he wanted to talk to her every day on the telephone and she would show up at his parties. He invited her to the family Christmas dinners. It was a shocking situation, especially in retrospect.”Taubman confronted Shultz. “He continued to defend her to my amazement and, frankly, my disappointment. I came at him pretty hard and he would not let go. He wouldn’t disown her. By this point, it was clear what was going on at Theranos. This was the ultimate expression of excessive loyalty.”Shultz’s family is still bitter.“Tyler continues to be hurt by his grandfather’s conduct. Puzzled by it. He attributed it in his own podcast to either colossal misjudgment or, ‘My grandfather was in love with her or he had a huge financial benefit invested in her.’ All of which was true.“It turns out she gave George Shultz a lot of Theranos stock and, at its peak valuation, that was worth $50m, so there may have been a financial motive too. At the sentencing, George’s son Alex [Tyler’s father] testified and talked about how she had desecrated – which is a wonderful word, a very apt word – the Shultz family.”Taubman reflects: “As I was working on the biography in those last years, when I would talk to people about Shultz, there were no longer questions like, ‘Tell me about his service as secretary of state, tell me what he did to end the cold war.’ It was all, ‘What’s he doing with Elizabeth Holmes?’ It stunted his last decade.“It shouldn’t overshadow what else he did. It was a sad coda at the end of his life. When you look back, he was a major figure in the latter half of the 20th century and pivotal figure in ending the cold war. And for that he deserves enormous credit.”
      In the Nation’s Service: the Life and Times of George P Shultz is published in the US by Stanford University Press More

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      Alexandra Petri’s US history review: if you’re going to lie, lie big – and funny

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      In the 18th century, sexting was much more difficult. It had to be conducted by letter, of course, resulting in long delays and messages arriving out of order – particularly if you were on opposite sides of the Atlantic, as John and Abigail Adams were in the late 1770s.Incredibly, we now have a record of their attempts to exchange lewd notes, published this month in Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up). The Washington Post humor columnist takes us on a tour of centuries of US history, including a first-hand look at the Adamses struggling to confirm how many petticoats and long shirts have been removed at any point in a year-and-a-half-long correspondence, interrupted by concerns over the health of their cows and a particularly lascivious note from Benjamin Franklin.It’s one of dozens of very funny essays stretching from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas to the presidency of Donald Trump. At a time when many elected officials are seeking to rewrite history to make America look better, “why stop at saying slavery was not so bad or Andrew Jackson was a swell guy? Why not actually commit to the principle of the thing and insert all the bizarre documents that you think ought to be there?” Petri writes.“If you’re going to lie about the past, lie big!”Petri works in a huge variety of formats: letters, poetry, scripts, maps. Important early documents include a European’s guide to naming places: (Options: “name of king but put town on the end”, “New [place you just left]”, “your ethnic group, plural, but put ‘boro’ on the end”); a guide to toys for Puritan parents (“There is nothing silly about this putty. It is plain, functional putty that can be used to imprint passages of scripture”); and a more realistic take on the minutemen, titled The Hour Men, because what if you need snacks or misplace your musket?Later we witness the author and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton trapped in a romcom while planning the landmark Seneca Falls convention, “because whenever a work-oriented woman goes to a small town for any reason, the town tries to seize her and put her in a Hallmark romance”. Stanton knows she “really ought to work on the Declaration of Sentiments,” Petri writes. “But for the first time in her life, she was feeling sentiments rather than just declaring them.”There’s a record of what civil war photographers said to posing troops: “Say: ‘Everyone I love will soon be dead!’ But don’t say it with your mouth, say it with your eyes.’” And there are plenty of literary parodies, including musing on what Edgar Allan Poe’s work would have been like had he just had a good handyman – maybe that telltale heart could have been removed and the House of Usher could have remained standing – and a rewriting of Fahrenheit 451 that dares to ask how, if books are banned, there are still enough being printed for book-burners to have a full-time job.More recent documents include a record of what Nancy Reagan’s psychic began predicting after she realized her words were affecting policy: “A romantic partner continues to be receptive to your influence. Consider urging him to do something about the Aids crisis.”Visual elements feature a blend of Thoreau and a perennially missing man, in the form of “Where’s Walden?”, and a PowerPoint presentation by Nikola Tesla’s friends, concerned that the physicist is in love with a pigeon (which is something he actually admitted to, one of several genuine pieces of history I learned from this book).Petri’s writing is consistently witty and erudite without the slightest hint of pretentiousness, and her tone is generally jovial and upbeat. Most of the book will be accessible to anyone who paid attention in high school history class, though there are a few essays with prerequisites: a spoof of the writer Shirley Jackson, for instance, went over my head despite a dim memory that I was forced to read The Lottery somewhere along the line. As is generally the case with parody, the better you know the original, the funnier it will be.“If you’re going to lie, lie big.” But Petri’s lies spring from vast knowledge of the facts of US history. If you can make the 19th-century debate over monetary policy funny, you’re clearly on to something.
      Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents I Made Up is published in the US by WW Norton More

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      A Fever in the Heartland review: chilling tale of the Klan and a dangerous leader

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      Hubris can be difficult to resist, no matter how well one appreciates the danger. Foremost, in his new book A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them”, Timothy Egan indicates just how self-destructive hubris can be.It led to the downfall of David C Stephenson, a sadistic, grifting, backstabbing, vengeful, womanizing grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the center of Egan’s story of extremism and white rage, a tale with many parallels to our own time. Similar overconfidence might yet bring down Donald J Trump. For sure, reading Egan’s gripping book, my own hubris nearly waylaid me.At first, it seemed no writer could possibly offer anything different from what had already been compellingly presented on TV. In 1989, I was among rapt multitudes introduced by the miniseries Cross of Fire to this lurid tale from the second rise of the Klan.The KKK was born at the close of the civil war, in resentment of burgeoning African American independence. By the 1890s it was fading, with the introduction of Jim Crow laws, but the first world war “birthed” a more virulent second coming. Determined to keep Black people in their place, klansmen were also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Native American, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-abortion and anti-communist.Cross of Fire, made 70 years later, concerned a rape and murder. Madge Oberholtzer was a 28-year-old educator, unmarried and living with her parents. Stephenson, her assailant, led the Indiana branch of the Klan. Armed with a private force, 30,000-strong, wielding graft and bribes, he reigned supreme, the governor and many other officials firmly under his thumb. When he was brought to trial, he was in no doubt he would get off.Cross of Fire was shown in two segments, two hours each, and reached about 20 million viewers. Back then, I think, a certain optimism was still alive in America. With most social struggles behind us, it was broadly imagined, we were well on the way to rectifying our worst problems. In that context, a televised account of the Klan’s insidious rise across 1920s America seemed almost hard to believe.But the truth is chilling. At one point, the Klan reached millions of white Americans. Feeling threatened by newly enfranchised women, growing numbers of immigrants and African Americans made restive by commendable war service, many such white men felt certain they had been robbed of the position their fathers and grandfathers knew. Stevenson was a crusading would-be strong man. If not plain-spoken, he was at least an ignorant man’s idea of a wise one. Seemingly amiable, seemingly much like those who followed him, to some he felt like an answered prayer.If this is starting to sound familiar, back in 1989 it seemed outrageously implausible. Weren’t the 1920s the Roaring Twenties, the rebellious, modernizing Jazz Age? Was it not an era of prosperity and wellbeing? The problem is a matter of nuance. Setbacks or backlash attendant to progress are seldom acknowledged with the same emphasis as advancement. That’s why it is imperative to teach all American history, good or bad.The idea of making America great again is an old one, rooted in a nativist embrace of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant supremacy. A hundred years ago, many were throughly taken in by nationalist rhetoric and circus-like spectacle.Stephenson had no education beyond high school. He was an ardent fan of Mussolini. He claimed he had studied psychology and knew how to play on people’s emotions. Klan rallies whipped up followers, as frenzied as any at Nuremberg, into ecstatic orgies of cheering. Some called beseechingly for Stephenson to become president. In the flickering light of flaming crosses, large banners insisted: “America is for Americans.” It all planted a seed in a man convinced that everything – and anyone – could be bought.In his book, Egan explains how, much as with African Americans and the Black church, to many whites, Klan membership “gave meaning, shape and purpose to the days”.From neo-Confederates to hardline Brexiters, how perplexing is the malfeasance, the villainy, the rank hypocrisy of those who preach law and order and freedom and justice the loudest? It all brings to mind Churchill’s observation about Stalin and Russia after the pact with Hitler in 1939: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”Undaunted, Egan examines and sorts out the complexities and contradictions of the rise of Stephenson and the Klan. In doing so, unlike a writer for TV, he has no need for dramatic license.In Cross of Fire, Oberholtzer marries Stephenson – or so she thinks. It turns out the officiant is a henchman. This detail is important. It sets into motion a supposed honeymoon, a joyride on a private railway car to Chicago, a wedding trip that facilitates Stephenson’s crime.Dealing in fact, Egan reveals that not even a pretend wedding took place. Oberholtzer believed Stephenson could keep her state job from being cut but she never trusted him to the extent of getting married. She was drugged and taken by force.On her deathbed, she summoned the will to give an account of her ordeal. A transcript was presented in court. So was a doctor’s testimony. As much as the poison Oberholtzer ingested, the doctor said, sepsis, from deep bites on her face, breasts, tongue and elsewhere, resulted in Oberholtzer’s death. With timely attention, her life might have been saved.Another fact absent from Cross of Fire but featured in Egan’s account is yet more disturbing. Stephenson was found guilty of Oberholtzer’s murder and sentenced to life, but he was never chastened. He broke parole and was re-imprisoned but he ultimately died a natural death, in 1966, aged 74. He tricked, cheated, married and sexually assaulted many times more. It is this learning of the limits of the wages of sin that distinguishes A Fever in the Heartland as an honest look at what really happened.
      A Fever in the Heartland is published in the US by Viking More

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      Unlikely Heroes review: the advisers who helped FDR shape America

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      No modern American political era has been the subject of more books than the 12 years in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. But Derek Leebaert’s personality-driven account of the life and times of our greatest president quickly convinces us there is a place for one more compelling volume.Leebaert’s formal focus is on the four people many agree were the most important deputies to FDR:
      Harry Hopkins, the “son of an itinerant harness maker from Iowa” who became the president’s number one adviser and as secretary of commerce the nation’s “largest employer”, as the New Deal fought to end the massive unemployment of the Great Depression.
      Harold Ickes, who Roosevelt “appointed out of nowhere” to be secretary of the interior, an early advocate for African Americans and Native Americans, the “first American official to be denounced by Hitler” and a “formidable war administrator” who became central to the allies’ victory in the second world war.
      Frances Perkins, secretary of labor and the first woman in the US cabinet, who made the creation of social security a condition of her employment during her job interview on the second floor of Roosevelt’s house on East 65th Street in Manhattan.
      Henry Wallace, the “foremost agronomist” in the western hemisphere who was secretary of agriculture and whose fabled intellectual strength was eventually matched by an extreme naivety about the failings of Joseph Stalin.
      Leebaert’s admirable strategy is to tell us as much about the personal struggles of these four giants as he does about their extraordinary achievements in the greatest administration of all. Part of his thesis is that they were so successful because their boss was as good at exploiting their weaknesses as he was at cultivating their strengths.Leebaert is also masterful at making his history relevant by reminding us of similarities between the challenges Roosevelt faced and issues that bedevil us today.It was during the re-election campaign in 1936 that FDR first talked about how a “concentration of wealth” had generated an “inequality of opportunity”. His more enlightened contemporaries were shocked that chief executive salaries of $100,000 towered over “the $1,200 that barely half of all families could hope for”.Leebaert immediately reminds us how much worse that problem has become in our time, when a “CEO’s job comes at a ratio of 320 to 1 for a worker’s”.There are many other echoes of our own time. We learn about Perkins’ foresight in trying to convince a young New York company, IBM, to invent a way of keeping track of state unemployment records. We are reminded that the original promoters of the America First slogan were the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, a publisher whose greediness and contempt for democracy have been perfectly replicated by Rupert Murdoch.Ickes’ personal struggles provide some of the book’s liveliest passages. First we learn that his “long wretched marriage to a rich divorcée only turned worse after he seduced his stepdaughter”. Almost as soon as he moved into his new office as secretary of the interior, Ickes began an affair with one Marguerite Moser. He dispatched Moser’s fiance to a job in the midwest, then hired his mistress at his own office as well as her female roommate. When the fiance complained that he wanted to come back to Washington, he got a job at headquarters as well.When Ickes started receiving blackmail letters about his affair, at the advice of a White House aide he used “the cruder methods of thuggish interior department investigators”. They persuaded a property manager to open the apartment of the jealous fiance, from which “carbon paper and an incriminating typewriter were removed”. The letters stopped and the fiance lost his government job – but eventually did marry Ickes’ mistress.Ickes’ defiance of convention had much more beneficial effects, as when he began his tenure by ending the segregation of Black and white employees at his department, then hired Black architects and engineers to work on some of thousands of New Deal public works projects.The scope of such efforts is suggested by the fact that in two days, Ickes authorized two of the biggest New York City transportation initiatives: the Lincoln tunnel under the Hudson river, connecting Manhattan and New Jersey, and the Triborough bridge that links three Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis was truly the era when the government worked for its citizens. The Works Progress Administration would eventually employ 9 million Americans over eight years. Between 1933 and 1940, “federal spending would double as tax revenue tripled, which included a Wealth Tax Act in 1935, which raised the top federal rate to 75%”.Also in 1935, the president signed into law his labor secretary’s signature project, the Social Security Act. The year before that, Ickes shepherded the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which ended 50 years of forced assimilation of Native Americans.The struggle to get the US into the second world war is covered with equal thoroughness in the second half of the book, including Ickes’ vital role as one of the first to identify the mortal danger posed by Hitler.Leebaert has written a panoramic history of one of the most successful eras of the US. By the end of his 432 pages, the author has made a convincing case that Roosevelt’s “fractious team of four” may well have been “the single most important to ever have shaped their country’s history”.
      Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More