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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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      US supreme court pursuing rightwing agenda via ‘shadow docket’, book says

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      Conservative justices on the US supreme court consciously broke with decades-old congressional rules and norms to shift laws governing religious freedom sharply to the right through a series of shadowy unsigned and unexplained emergency orders, a new book reveals.Five of the six conservatives who now command the majority on the US’s most powerful court have rammed through some of their most contentious and extreme partisan decisions using the so-called “shadow docket” – unsigned orders issued frequently late at night, in literal and metaphorical darkness. The orders do not reveal who voted for them or why, often providing one-line explanations of the legal thinking behind them.The switch from openly argued cases, aired in public, to the unaccountability of the shadow docket was made purposefully during the pandemic in cases dealing with religious liberty, concludes Stephen Vladeck, an authority on the federal courts at the University of Texas law school. He warns that the trend is merging with the current ethics scandals surrounding the conservative justice Clarence Thomas to damage the legitimacy of the court and threaten a full-blown constitutional crisis.Vladeck exposes the largely unnoticed shift towards furtive justice in his new book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. He shows how rightwing justices have abused the court’s emergency powers to run roughshod over the longstanding norm that shadow docket orders should be used sparingly and with extreme caution.Rightwing justices are now deploying such orders dozens of times each term. Over three terms alone, from 2019 to 2022, the court granted emergency relief in more than 60 cases: effectively overturning the considered decisions of lower courts through rushed, unexplained rulings.Among those orders were decisions that have had profound and nationwide impact over some of the most hotly disputed areas of public life, from abortion to immigration, voting rights, the death penalty and religious practices. Many appear to align more closely with Republican political priorities than with legal principles.One such order alone, the decision on the shadow docket to block the Biden administration’s January 2022 requirement that large employers mandate Covid vaccinations for their workforce, affected more than 83 million Americans – about a quarter of the US population.“The rise of the shadow docket reflects a power grab by a court that has, for better or worse, been insulated from any kind of legislative response,” Vladeck writes.The author chronicles how the most disturbing use of the shadow docket came with the rewriting of constitutional protections for religious liberty. The dramatic shift followed the death of the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement in 2020 with a devout Catholic rightwinger, Amy Coney Barrett.The switch gave the conservative majority sufficient votes to overcome all resistance to ramping up use of the shadow docket, including from the chief justice, John Roberts, who though conservative has expressed mounting unease about the practice.The change in tactics could be seen almost immediately. Within weeks of taking her seat, Barrett joined four other rightwingers – Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – to drive through a major change in the constitutional understanding of religious liberty, blocking New York state Covid restrictions on the numbers of worshippers allowed to gather in churches.The order was unsigned and gave virtually no explanation for a decision that profoundly changed the law of the land, rolling back government regulations where they touched upon religious practices. It was issued at four minutes before midnight on the day before Thanksgiving – a moment that would guarantee minimal media attention.The ruling was all the more extraordinary as by then New York had scaled back its Covid restrictions and churches no longer had to limit congregation sizes. So the court’s change in the law was moot.The same five rightwing justices went on to impose their will on religious liberty laws with similar late-night one-sentence rulings knocking back state Covid restrictions in California, New Jersey and Colorado. In total, the majority issued emergency injunctions against state Covid rules on religious grounds six times in four months.The sudden spate of shadow docket orders that followed Barrett’s arrival on the court was not accidental, Vladeck says. The justices could have taken up several pending cases in full court that would have addressed the issue of religious freedoms in open hearings on the merits, yet they chose to go the obscure shadow docket route.“Here we have the court not just using emergency applications to change substantive legal principles, but doing so even as they are considering requests to make the same changes through merits decisions,” Vladeck told the Guardian.Vladeck links the rise of the shadow docket to the increasing isolation of the supreme court and its disconnection from public opinion. The growing use of the shadow docket also mirrors the polarisation and toxification of American politics.Vladeck warns that the growing trend towards jurisprudence produced in darkness is endangering the legitimacy of the nation’s most powerful court. Public confidence in the court is already at a historic low, compounded by the recent revelations that Thomas accepted lavish gifts from the Republican billionaire Harlan Crow.“The shadow docket is a symptom of a larger disease,” Vladeck said. “The disease is how unchecked and unaccountable the court is today, compared to any of its predecessors.” More

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      The Last Honest Man: Frank Church and the fight to restrain US power

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      Frank Forrester Church sat in the US Senate for 24 years. His tenure was consequential. A Democrat, he battled for civil rights and came to oppose the Vietnam war. He believed Americans were citizens, not subjects. Chairing the intelligence select committee was his most enduring accomplishment. James Risen, a Pulitzer-winning reporter now with the Intercept, sees him as a hero. The Last Honest Man is both paean and lament.“For decades … the CIA’s operations faced only glancing scrutiny from the White House, and virtually none from Congress,” Risen writes. “True oversight would have to wait until 1975, and the arrival on the national stage of a senator from Idaho, Frank Church.”For 16 months, Church and his committee scrutinized the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency and their many abuses. Amid the cold war, in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress grappled with the balance between civil liberties and national security, executive prerogative and congressional authority.Political assassinations, covert operations and domestic surveillance finally received scrutiny and oversight. A plot to kill Fidel Castro, with an assist from organized crime, made headlines. So did the personal ties that bound John F Kennedy, mob boss Sam Giancana and their shared mistress, Judith Campbell Exner.Giancana was murdered before he testified. Before John Rosselli, another mobster, could make a third appearance, his decomposed body turned up in a steel fuel drum near Miami.One subheading in the Church committee’s interim report bears the title: “The Question of Whether the Assassination Operation Involving Underworld Figures Was Known About by Attorney General Kennedy or President Kennedy as Revealed by Investigations of Giancana and Rosselli”.Against this grizzly but intriguing backdrop, Risen’s book is aptly subtitled: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy. The Last Honest Man is a gem, marbled with scoop, laden with interviews.In 2006, Risen won the Pulitzer prize for his coverage of George W Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Risen was also part of the New York Times team that snagged a Pulitzer in the aftermath of September 11. He endured a seven-year legal battle with the Bush and Obama justice departments, for refusing to name a source. Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, backed off. But he earned Risen’s lasting ire.In 2015, Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation”. Holder, he said, “has done the bidding of the intelligence community and the White House to damage press freedom in the United States”.And then came Donald Trump.Risen now describes Dick Cheney’s efforts to block Church’s committee, as chief of staff to Gerald Ford. To Cheney’s consternation, the president “refused to engage in an all-out war”. So Cheney nursed a grudge and bided his time.In 1987, Cheney and congressional Republicans issued a dissent on Iran-Contra, blaming the Church committee for the concept of “all but unlimited congressional power”. Later, as vice-president to George W Bush, Cheney zestily embraced the theory of the unitary executive, the global “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq.The Last Honest Man also doubles as a guide to high-stakes politics. Risen captures Gary Hart and the late Walter Mondale on the record. Both Democratic presidential hopefuls – Mondale the candidate in 1984, Hart the frontrunner, briefly, in the 1988 race – after sitting on Church’s committee. The three senators were competitors and colleagues. Paths and ambitions intersected.Church entered the 1976 Democratic presidential primary late – and lost to Jimmy Carter. Carter weighed picking Church as his running mate but opted for Mondale instead.“I think he had seen me on a Sunday news talk show, talking about the Church committee, and he liked how I looked and sounded,” Mondale told Risen.It was for the best. Church never cottoned to Carter, failing hide his disdain. Carter and his aides returned the favor. They “hated Church right back”. David Aaron, a Church aide and later deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, recalls: “I know that whenever Church’s name came up, Brzezinski would grimace.”In 1980, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush beat Carter and Mondale in a landslide. The election also cost Church his seat and the Democrats control of the Senate. Four years later, Mondale bested Hart for the Democratic nomination, only to be shellacked by Reagan-Bush again.Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, leaves his mark on Risen’s pages too. He played a “previously undisclosed role in the Church committee’s investigation of the assassinations of foreign leaders”, Risen reports in a lengthy footnote.In an interview, Ellsberg says he “met privately” with Church in 1975, as the committee investigated assassination plots. In Risen’s telling, Ellsberg cops to handing Church “a manilla envelope containing copies of a series of top-secret cables” between the US embassy in South Vietnam and “the Kennedy White House”.The messages purportedly pertained to the “US role in the planning of the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese president [Ngô Đình] Diệm that resulted in his assassination”. The Church committee interim report referred to cable traffic between the embassy in Saigon and the White House but contained no mention of Ellsberg.In other words, assassinations and coups carry a bipartisan legacy. It wasn’t just Eisenhower and Nixon, Iran and Chile.Risen hails Church as “an American Cicero” who “offered the United States a brief glimpse of what it would be like to turn away from its imperialistic ambitions … and return to its roots as a republic”.He overstates, but not by much. Iraq and its aftermath still reverberate. But for that debacle, it is unlikely Trumpism would have attained the purchase it still possesses. Our national divide would not be as deep – or intractable. Church died in April 1984, aged just 59.
      The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Moms for Liberty, meet John Birch: the roots of US rightwing book bans

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      Moms for Liberty is a Florida-based pressure group which campaigns for book bans in US public schools, an issue at the heart of the national debate as Republican-run states seek to control or eliminate teaching of sex education, LGBTQ+ rights and racism in American history.But rightwing calls for school book bans are by no means a new phenomenon – and a look at the Moms for Liberty website indicates why.Moms for Liberty seeks to organise “Madison Meetups”, events it describes as “like a book club for the constitution!”, featuring discussion of “liberty, freedom and the foundation of our government”. Under “resources that we have found helpful”, the only resource offered is The Making of America, a book by W Cleon Skousen.In the early 1960s, Skousen was a hero to and a defender of the John Birch Society, a far-right group that campaigned against what it claimed was the communist threat to America.Matthew Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, is the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. He points out that though the Birchers were not the only ones promoting book bans in the 60s, “they were likely the most visible group promoting book bans or promoting the policing of content in schools, libraries, movie theaters, even on newsstands”.The Birchers, Dallek adds, focused on “the so-called erosion of the moral fiber of the United States, but also the struggle to rid the country of what they regarded as really the socialist left wing”.The society still exists but its influence is greater than its presence, most obviously through a resurgence of Bircher-esque thought and action in the Republican party of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.In the society’s heyday, Dallek says, book bans and school board elections, another current battlefield, “gave Birchers a way to take action in their community.“They looked at where their kids went to school and their local library and the movie theater they would pass by. Part of their agenda was to insert what they considered Americanist publications, as opposed to communist propaganda.“What’s frightening now is that I don’t recall a time where those efforts were so often successful. Moms for Liberty and the other successors to the John Birch Society, they’re having a lot more success at actually implementing their vision.”Last month, the writers’ organisation Pen America reported a 28% rise in public school book bans in just six months. As the 2024 election approaches, attacks on the place of race in history classes and teaching on LGBTQ+ issues seem certain to feature in Republican debates and town halls.Dallek considers the Birchers’ influence on the Republican party over more than 60 years. But he can’t recall the society inspiring “any sweeping legislation like Florida has now passed, through three major bills. And one in particular, it’s very Orwellian. They have these education minders who have to approve all texts in school libraries. That was certainly a dream of the Birch Society.”Tactics are familiar too. Birchers often protested against what they called pornography in books and teaching, as a vehicle for communistic thought. Now, the hard right sees pornography in books on LGBTQ+ rights, in drag queen story hours, or in the casting of children’s plays.Dallek says: “Whatever the language is, whether it’s ‘woke’, or ‘progressive’, or ‘pornographic’, or ‘communistic’, in a way the brilliance of the Birchers and other groups is in the way they use language. They’re able to distill ideas and aspects of the culture they find offensive and brand them as something evil, something un-American, something that will twist and pollute the minds of kids.“I don’t know that they meant that it was literally communistic to teach sex ed in schools but it was a kind of brilliant shorthand, because they were able to mobilise a lot of supporters by saying this was a civilizational battle. A battle for whether your children will grow up being moral or not, whether they’ll have a decent life.“And if we want to bring it back to today, Ron DeSantis is out there claiming, ‘We’re only banning books that are pornographic or that kids should not be exposed to.’ But then when you’re talking about banning Toni Morrison? I mean, come on. It’s ridiculous.”But it’s real. The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, and her masterpiece Beloved have been removed from some Florida libraries.Dallek notes other echoes. For instance, the role of rightwing women.“Historically, schools have been in terms of teaching jobs often reserved for women. And so, ironically, in the 1960s and 70s, as feminism becomes a major force in the culture and many women expect to work outside the home and be active politically, conservative, really far-right women take an element of that and get active in their communities.“Women have been on the frontlines of many of these fights to ban books, to police what kids are learning. Parental rights, the whole idea … is I think focused at the moms and … imposing their version of Christian morals on public education and many public spaces.“To go back to the W Cleon Skousen thing” on the Moms for Liberty website, “it does suggest a link to the past. Skousen continued to write in the 1980s and 90s. He was a defender of the John Birch Society and was held up as a hero.”Skousen died in 2006. Seventeen years later, to Dallek his recommendation from Moms for Liberty “suggests there really is a tradition in modern American politics, on the far right, that has become much more mainstream.“Groups like Moms for Liberty understand that. That there’s a set of ideas, and a literature, and a whole kind of subculture around this effort to police ideas and morality in schools. And they are tapping into that very effectively.”
      Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right is published in the US by Hachette 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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      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

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      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More