In the realm of politics, especially in Washington, it can be hard to see past carefully-created public veneers and crafted legacies to the often imperfect person behind the legend. This is especially true for the First Ladies of the United States (FLOTUSs), who are often cast as non-controversial supporting figures in their husband's administrations. These women often have less public visibility, often rivalled or overshadowed by the power of their husband's office, even as they become national and international icons. This leaves much to be desired for those like myself who want to know more about the impacts these ladies made on American history and whose school courses more often focused on presidents. Former Bloomberg journalist and researcher Kate Andersen Brower offers readers a chance to sate their curiosity with a peek behind the sometimes obfuscating legends and narratives surrounding the presidency and first ladyship in her 2016 entry First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies.
First Women focuses exclusively on the tenures of ten first ladies in the modern era, defined in the book as the time period between 1960 and the present: Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama. (As of the time of publication of the book, Melania Trump was not officially First Lady, but the author includes speculation of what kind of FLOTUS she could be in First Women's afterword). Drawing upon more than 200 interviews with former FLOTUSs and their family, friends, aides and residence staffers (including research from her first book The Residence, an intimate view of the White House through the eyes of residence staffers) along with newly available public materials and scholarship, Brower weaves a complicated narrative surrounding American politics's "most elite sorority" (Brower, 2016, p. 5).
Rather than focus on each former FLOTUS chronologically, Brower chooses to intertwine ten narratives under topical chapters, from a discussion about their political dabblings to their public and private relationships with their husbands and other first ladies. While this jumping back and forth in the timeline can be disorienting and sometimes disrupts the flow of the book, I found it an effective mechanism for showing the carry-over between both Democratic and Republican administrations in terms of the underlying traditions of the ever-evolving first ladyship. An unofficial office, the first ladyship nonetheless demands much of the women who ascend to the position upon inauguration: to take on the public work of sympathetic advocate for the common people and defender of their husbands' political dealings (from tirelessly campaigning to being a confidante), while also providing for their families as mothers and spouses.
Each FLOTUS interpreted the latter mandates in their own way, producing an interesting spectrum of political involvement and personal relationships. Some FLOTUSs were highly influential in the crafting of policy (Hillary Clinton, Rosalynn Carter, and Lady Bird Johnson with their most famous work in healthcare reform, mental health and human rights, and civil rights and environmental causes, respectively), while others preferred to be more traditional, utilizing domestic charisma and soft power in supporting their husbands' political agendas (like Pat Nixon, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy, who dabbled more often in White House preservation projects and FLOTUS-traditional social causes like literacy and education). Despite their different conceptions of the role of FLOTUS, unlikely friendships and lifelong bonds were formed along the way, even between spouses of presidents on opposing sides of the political spectrum, like that between Laura Bush and Michelle Obama and Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy. These relationships often were formed for good or ill during the traditional tour of the White House given by the incumbent FLOTUS to the incoming first lady.
First Women shows each of these women at their worst and best and allows the readers to come out with a greater appreciation for how each FLOTUS navigated the tightrope of political (and sometimes feminist) icon and supporting player roles and the continuing gendered expectations of the office. Add in a healthy dose of public scrutiny, political attacks, and scandal, and one cannot help but admire how tough these women all were, regardless of political persuasion. However, at times the impartiality of the author was strained by gossipy chapters focusing on the bad blood and feuds between first ladies (for example, Barbara Bush's disdain for her much younger successor in Jackie Kennedy or Michelle Obama's lingering resentment of Hillary Clinton for her personal attacks against the Obamas during the heated 2008 presidential campaign) and seeming harshness towards some first ladies (Michelle Obama, for example, who was repeatedly reported as being highly unhappy as FLOTUS). The sisterhood isn't perfect, but the author sometimes lost focus on the overall unity of the first ladies forged from shared experiences.
Despite these flaws, readers of First Women emerge with a greater understanding of the humanity of these complicated women, a greater appreciation for their service to the country, and their places in history and the American political pantheon. While Brower's book is a more general biographical look at these women, it nonetheless is able to give readers a better look at the under-appreciated power brokers in our nation's first ladies.
Works Cited:
Brower, Kate Andersen. (2016). First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies. New York: Harpercollins.
Friday, September 14, 2018
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Book Review: Michael Isikoff and David Corn's "Russian Roulette"
Back in December of last year, I reviewed Luke Harding's Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, coming out of reading it with the conclusion that there is a lot of smoke, but that the fire hadn't been located in all the obfuscation. And many allegations made were as of yet not verified. As the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election has steamed along surely but slowly, new revelations and evidence has been revealed that shed a bit more light on Trump-Russia ties and has benefited subsequent authors of many current (and probably many future) books on this subject. New events include the Helsinki summit in which Trump and Putin met in secret (no communique ever appeared after the summit as to what they talked about personally) and Trump publicly rebuffed U.S. intelligence's strong assertion that Russians meddled in the 2016 election while continuing his praise for the Russian president and strongman Vladimir Putin (which even raised the hackles of some of Trump's supporters). Investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn definitely have an advantage over Harding's Collusion by virtue of the inevitable coming to light of further evidence in the public square over time that comes from careful investigation. Their 2018 entry Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump indirectly utilizes early works on the subject like Collusion and adds a crucial dimension to the narrative by taking advantage of insider accounts of the fight and controversies around shoring up America's vulnerable election infrastructure.
While Isikoff and Corn do explore more in depth about Trump's past in Russia, including previously undisclosed meetings that some of his colleagues (former and present, like Flynn or Manafort) engaged in, there is largely nothing new from what has been reported in the media this past year. Such as the fact that Trump's involvement in 2013 with the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow was not the first contact he had with Russia, with his drive to do business with Putin and the Kremlin in the Russian real-estate market going back at least a decade or so from the Miss Universe event. Shady deals with Russian oligarchs and Kremlin officials ensued between Trump and within his inner circle, with some still shrouded in mystery. What makes Russian Roulette stand out in the latest wave of Trump-Russia centered books is its exploration of new dimensions to the story in that of cyber espionage, troll farms, and campaign and election systems hacking as part of a larger geopolitical strategy, and the fact that the authors don't cringe from showing both the Clinton and Trump campaigns in sometimes unsavory lights.
Both campaigns were wary of the intelligence community, with the Clinton email investigation seeming ill-timed on former FBI director Comey's part and the Trump campaign viewing the FBI's counterintelligence operation probing suspicious dealings between members of his camp and Russia as a witch-hunt. However, as Isikoff and Corn assert throughout Russian Roulette, this wariness on both sides in cooperating with federal officials may have hindered efforts to defend against an ongoing wave of Russian cyberattacks on American public and private entities, including election infrastructure. To put events into their larger geopolitical context, Isikoff and Corn explore the emergence of what is termed the "Gerasimov doctrine" in 2013, named after a Russian general who described that a strong tilt towards the conduct of war in the cyber realm could be as effective at achieving the national interest as conventional warfare (Isikoff & Corn, 2018, p. 44). These operations could range from the actual targeting of the electrical grid to the social media operations revealed to have happened during the 2016 election campaign, with Russian hackers and bots using fake social media accounts to spout out inflammatory and untrue stories about both campaigns. While these operations aren't new, with Chinese and North Korea also taking stabs at the U.S., the Russian actions in America seem to have been of a much larger scale.
Around the time the DNC was first believed to have been hacked by Russian intelligence agencies (the most infamous organization being the Internet Research Agency) in September of 2015, with parallel hacks happening to GOP computers, it was not taken seriously right away. Isikoff and Corn paint a picture of a suspicious Clinton campaign wary of assisting FBI investigators and a Democratic Party largely occupied by the bruising presidential campaign, with emails coming out apparently showing disdain and hostility towards the Sanders campaign and causing intra-party divisions. When DNC leadership learned about various hacks on DNC organizations and the Clinton campaign, they were advised to keep news of the hacks on the down-low while cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attempted to oust the Russian intruders, the FBI investigated, and the Obama administration mulled how to respond to the blatant intrusion, worried that further sanctions under the Magnitsky Act or a counter cyber-operation would jeopardize their attempts at a diplomatic thaw with Russia that could prove fruitful in terms of counter-terrorism or arms treaty negotiations. (It wouldn't be until December 2016, after the election, when the Obama administration imposed new sanctions on Russian intelligence arms-the GRU and the FSB-and three related Russian companies, close Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York, and kick out 35 Russian diplomats suspected to be spies.)
With the 2016 election over and a seemingly Russia-friendly administration in office, speculation over whether Trump was compromised by Russia grew during the first year of his office, which saw early attempts to ease or eliminate Obama administration sanctions (this was thwarted by Congress over Trump's veto threat), his firing of FBI director James Comey seemingly over the continued Trump-Russia investigation, his friendly summit meetings with Putin (two of which were covered by this book), revelations of previous Trump Tower meetings to get dirt on Clinton, and continued GOP efforts to discredit the special counsel appointed to oversee the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller. Where we go from here is anyone's guess at this point. Undoubtedly, future volumes will be able to present a better timeline of all of these events.
Sure, the promise of the subtitle was never satisfactorily explored, as the evidence presented in Russian Roulette remains far from definitively proved, insofar as the Mueller investigation remains in progress and a final verdict on the subject has yet to be rendered on this unbelievably complex story. That's the inevitable result of ongoing investigations combined with the bureaucratic secrecy surrounding such cases, where the appearance of political impartiality and protection of top-secret intelligence information and sources involved is paramount. However, all the minutiae is frustrating. Throw in the time-honored tradition of reporters protecting their sources, with anonymity both helping to persuade individuals who might not otherwise want to talk (but recognize something is wrong or needs to be said) but frustrating efforts to fact-check and verify a source's credibility. There were multiple anonymous sources cited in Russian Roulette and one cannot be sure a source is always credible and presenting "the facts." Moreover, I was concerned about how Isikoff and Corn used their information and sources to present what at times seem a simplified and monolithic portrayal of Russia as the villain and the U.S. as the hero, largely ignoring that there are Russian dissidents who genuinely want to work with the United States and help Russia transition back to democracy.
Overall, Russian Roulette is a smart piece of investigative work, despite the flaws I described above, with its helpful exploration of a new dimension of geopolitics in cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare and careful (i.e. detailed) chronological portrayal of events helpful to general readers like myself not intimately involved in American political inner circles. If anything, the main message from this is to remain vigilant and to keep watch on what seems to be a new and expanding geopolitical frontier in cyberspace along with the progression of Mueller's investigation. As they say, stay tuned!
Works Cited:
Isikoff, Michael, & Corn, David. (2018). Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. New York: Hachette Book Group.
Wintour, Patrick. (2018, July 17). Helsinki Summit: What Did Trump and Putin Agree? Retrieved August 13, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/17/helsinki-summit-what-did-trump-and-putin-agree.
While Isikoff and Corn do explore more in depth about Trump's past in Russia, including previously undisclosed meetings that some of his colleagues (former and present, like Flynn or Manafort) engaged in, there is largely nothing new from what has been reported in the media this past year. Such as the fact that Trump's involvement in 2013 with the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow was not the first contact he had with Russia, with his drive to do business with Putin and the Kremlin in the Russian real-estate market going back at least a decade or so from the Miss Universe event. Shady deals with Russian oligarchs and Kremlin officials ensued between Trump and within his inner circle, with some still shrouded in mystery. What makes Russian Roulette stand out in the latest wave of Trump-Russia centered books is its exploration of new dimensions to the story in that of cyber espionage, troll farms, and campaign and election systems hacking as part of a larger geopolitical strategy, and the fact that the authors don't cringe from showing both the Clinton and Trump campaigns in sometimes unsavory lights.
Both campaigns were wary of the intelligence community, with the Clinton email investigation seeming ill-timed on former FBI director Comey's part and the Trump campaign viewing the FBI's counterintelligence operation probing suspicious dealings between members of his camp and Russia as a witch-hunt. However, as Isikoff and Corn assert throughout Russian Roulette, this wariness on both sides in cooperating with federal officials may have hindered efforts to defend against an ongoing wave of Russian cyberattacks on American public and private entities, including election infrastructure. To put events into their larger geopolitical context, Isikoff and Corn explore the emergence of what is termed the "Gerasimov doctrine" in 2013, named after a Russian general who described that a strong tilt towards the conduct of war in the cyber realm could be as effective at achieving the national interest as conventional warfare (Isikoff & Corn, 2018, p. 44). These operations could range from the actual targeting of the electrical grid to the social media operations revealed to have happened during the 2016 election campaign, with Russian hackers and bots using fake social media accounts to spout out inflammatory and untrue stories about both campaigns. While these operations aren't new, with Chinese and North Korea also taking stabs at the U.S., the Russian actions in America seem to have been of a much larger scale.
Around the time the DNC was first believed to have been hacked by Russian intelligence agencies (the most infamous organization being the Internet Research Agency) in September of 2015, with parallel hacks happening to GOP computers, it was not taken seriously right away. Isikoff and Corn paint a picture of a suspicious Clinton campaign wary of assisting FBI investigators and a Democratic Party largely occupied by the bruising presidential campaign, with emails coming out apparently showing disdain and hostility towards the Sanders campaign and causing intra-party divisions. When DNC leadership learned about various hacks on DNC organizations and the Clinton campaign, they were advised to keep news of the hacks on the down-low while cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attempted to oust the Russian intruders, the FBI investigated, and the Obama administration mulled how to respond to the blatant intrusion, worried that further sanctions under the Magnitsky Act or a counter cyber-operation would jeopardize their attempts at a diplomatic thaw with Russia that could prove fruitful in terms of counter-terrorism or arms treaty negotiations. (It wouldn't be until December 2016, after the election, when the Obama administration imposed new sanctions on Russian intelligence arms-the GRU and the FSB-and three related Russian companies, close Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York, and kick out 35 Russian diplomats suspected to be spies.)
With the 2016 election over and a seemingly Russia-friendly administration in office, speculation over whether Trump was compromised by Russia grew during the first year of his office, which saw early attempts to ease or eliminate Obama administration sanctions (this was thwarted by Congress over Trump's veto threat), his firing of FBI director James Comey seemingly over the continued Trump-Russia investigation, his friendly summit meetings with Putin (two of which were covered by this book), revelations of previous Trump Tower meetings to get dirt on Clinton, and continued GOP efforts to discredit the special counsel appointed to oversee the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller. Where we go from here is anyone's guess at this point. Undoubtedly, future volumes will be able to present a better timeline of all of these events.
Sure, the promise of the subtitle was never satisfactorily explored, as the evidence presented in Russian Roulette remains far from definitively proved, insofar as the Mueller investigation remains in progress and a final verdict on the subject has yet to be rendered on this unbelievably complex story. That's the inevitable result of ongoing investigations combined with the bureaucratic secrecy surrounding such cases, where the appearance of political impartiality and protection of top-secret intelligence information and sources involved is paramount. However, all the minutiae is frustrating. Throw in the time-honored tradition of reporters protecting their sources, with anonymity both helping to persuade individuals who might not otherwise want to talk (but recognize something is wrong or needs to be said) but frustrating efforts to fact-check and verify a source's credibility. There were multiple anonymous sources cited in Russian Roulette and one cannot be sure a source is always credible and presenting "the facts." Moreover, I was concerned about how Isikoff and Corn used their information and sources to present what at times seem a simplified and monolithic portrayal of Russia as the villain and the U.S. as the hero, largely ignoring that there are Russian dissidents who genuinely want to work with the United States and help Russia transition back to democracy.
Overall, Russian Roulette is a smart piece of investigative work, despite the flaws I described above, with its helpful exploration of a new dimension of geopolitics in cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare and careful (i.e. detailed) chronological portrayal of events helpful to general readers like myself not intimately involved in American political inner circles. If anything, the main message from this is to remain vigilant and to keep watch on what seems to be a new and expanding geopolitical frontier in cyberspace along with the progression of Mueller's investigation. As they say, stay tuned!
Works Cited:
Isikoff, Michael, & Corn, David. (2018). Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. New York: Hachette Book Group.
Wintour, Patrick. (2018, July 17). Helsinki Summit: What Did Trump and Putin Agree? Retrieved August 13, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/17/helsinki-summit-what-did-trump-and-putin-agree.
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