Bland, dutiful, self-serving, and unconvincing.
The colorless Trump functionary fails to inspire in a look-at-me memoir.
“One rule applies to both fathers-in-law and presidents. When they ask for help, there’s only one answer: yes.” Another rule applies to Kushner’s memoir: When it works, he gets the credit; when it doesn’t, others are to blame. The author risks dislocating his shoulder patting himself on the back for having “orchestrated some of the most significant breakthroughs in diplomacy in the last fifty years.” Naturally, he accomplished these and other feats by learning geopolitics on the fly while facing down a host of opponents single-handedly. When not self-congratulatory—or fawning, when it comes to the man whom he at least calls Trump, usually without the increasingly inappropriate-seeming honorific “President”—Kushner is aggrieved. He opens with an embittered account of his father’s prosecution at the hands of attorney Chris Christie for witness tampering and violations against the Mann Act, whereupon Christie “sought to punish my father in a way that would hurt the most: by putting other Kushner…executives in jail, bankrupting the family business, and shutting it down for good.” This Kushner secured his revenge by keeping Christie out of the Trump White House, but he’s an equal-opportunity hater, both barrels constantly aimed at Steve Bannon—a gossipy morsel is that Bannon, by Kushner’s account, “didn’t hide his disappointment” when Kellyanne Conway passed a drug test—but also trained on Priebus, Lewandowski, Kelly, Comey, Fauci, and a battery of other well-known names. As for Trump, father to the “arrestingly beautiful” Ivanka, well, he can do no wrong except perhaps to be overly enthusiastic. So, it seems, were those who stormed the Capitol, an event to which Kushner devotes just a couple of cautious, don’t-blame-us pages (“no one at the White House expected violence that day”).
Bland, dutiful, self-serving, and unconvincing.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-322148-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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