After a recent event in Washington, I started to chat with a person I will call Sam. He had my complete attention when he said his years of work at USAID had ended abruptly when he was given minutes to clear out his office and was fired with a mandatory sixty-day period for that to take effect.
Sam’s career was spent working in hard places. (Trust me.) I said I wanted to write about him with assurances that his identity would be protected. In return, he gave me a complete, unvarnished account of how Elon Musk, DOGE, and designees from the Trump administration obliterated USAID only days after the inauguration on January 20.
Until 2024, USAID had an annual budget averaging $23 billion, with programs in education, food, health, environment, and democracy support, less than 1 percent of the federal budget. Estimates of lives saved every year was in the millions. There were about 10,000 employees around the world — most are gone. There is a remnant of about fifty people working on the closeout because as an independent government agency, only Congress can eliminate it altogether.
Aggregate numbers of job losses tend to be impersonal. But every one of these people has had their livelihood — their paychecks, their sense of security, and their dedicated mission — ended at the whim of a president and his cohort, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a professed admirer of USAID over the years.
Getting back to Sam. He became interested in sub-Saharan Africa as a student, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees as his focus. After arriving in Washington, he held a series of positions that deepened his interests and broadened his knowledge before arriving at USAID.
With experience and energy, Sam was given more responsibility. He considered himself a professional and not an advocate. If priorities in Washington changed, he would adjust his field work accordingly. Sam is an idealist with a commitment to progress. During the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, he persevered through war zones, famines, terrorism, and threats to his personal safety — always working toward goals that may have seemed out of reach yet were worthy and admirable.
As in every government agency, USAID’s bureaucracy was frustrating. But unlike their counterparts around the world at the State Department, the CIA, or the military, USAID’s work was harder to quantify in terms of lives saved, services rendered, or democratic structures advanced — or whether its funds were well spent or squandered.
Each administration had its achievements. George W. Bush’s success in establishing PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was as meaningful as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were violent and costly.
The Obama and Biden administrations were well staffed. But the stature of celebrities like Hillary Clinton at State and Samantha Power at USAID were distractions when their roles collided with politics and media fascinations.
Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term reflected his skepticism of USAID’s objectives and its loyalty to Trump’s agenda. Career staff at the agency were criticized for being “too close” to their issues or too much “in the weeds.” Upheavals elsewhere meant that relatively little attention could be paid to monitoring foreign assistance.
The Biden years were mostly smooth. The regions of Sam’s specialty continued to roil, and it was increasingly clear that America had moved its focus elsewhere. For instance, the once widely recognized famines and genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan largely receded as a cause célèbre.
And then came Trump’s second inauguration, with the issuance that day of Executive Order 14169: “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”
As Sam recalled: “The overall guidance from our superiors was, paraphrasing, to ‘keep your head down,’ ‘keep doing what you are doing,’ and ‘let’s make this as painless as possible.’ There was certainly internal denial and wishful thinking. The feeling was that this couldn’t happen and that Congress and/or the courts wouldn’t allow it. In retrospect, the outcome was clear.”
The full, harrowing story of those early weeks was in the New York Times in June and a Daily episode in October
Sam’s termination took effect July 1. He and most of his colleagues were now unemployed.
I asked Sam how he felt USAID could have been improved. He mentioned procurement reform; greater efforts at having local organizations involved in planning and activities; understanding the complexities of politics and conflict, wherever they were working; reaching out to an American public largely unaware or indifferent to USAID’s mission.
None of that is now possible. The demolition of USAID was accomplished with pretty much the same speed and ruthlessness as what was done to the East Wing of the White House to make way for Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom.
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With the PBS series airing nationwide, here is an insight to Henry Kissinger whose genius was matched by his ego and astonishing insecurities. Below is a reprint of an article I wrote for the Outlook section of The Washington Post when Kissinger’s memoirs were published in 1979. Whatever else Kissinger was, he was thin-skinned. He did not like this piece and complained to Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher. She sent the letter to Benjamin C. Bradlee, the newspaper’s editor. He forwarded the letter to me and wrote: “Here’s one for your baby book.” Nha told me that he was proud of the piece and kept a copy. So here it is again.
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To be the single most vilified individual in Henry’s Kissinger’s new memoirs is, if not exactly an honor, then at least a distinction. The bearer of this opprobrium — he is described variously as “outrageous,” “egregious” and “obnoxious” — is a Vietnamese named Hoang Duc Nha, now an engineer for General Electric and formerly a close adviser to South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu. Nha’s disputable role came during the hectic months of summer and fall, 1972, when Kissinger was cobbling together what became known as the Paris Peace Accords — the agreements that ostensibly ended the was but in fact merely permitted American withdrawal.
Kissinger blames Nha for delaying the progress of those accords once their terms had been basicaly set in secret talks with North Vietnam. Moreover, according to Kissinger, Nha was consistently rude and devious, with an ability to infuriate his American interlocutors that was clearly formidable. Kissinger writes:
“America had to take some responsibility for the egregious Nha. He was in his early thirties; he had been educated in the United States and in the process had seen too many movies of sharp young men succeeding by their wits; he came on like the early Alan Ladd in a gangster role. He was dressed in the fanciest Hollywood style, spoke American English fluently and had retained from his Vietnamese background only an infinite capacity for intrigue. He reinforced Thieu’s inherent suspiciousness. Both [Ambassador Ellsworth] Bunker and I were convinced that he did much mischief in exacerbating every misunderstanding.”
After reading this I decided to search out Nha, whom I knew in Saigon in the early 1970s’, and get something of his side as well as finding out about his life now. Regardless of what one thought of them at the time, it had to be conceded that our South Vietnamese allies were correct in their abiding fears that the Paris accords would bring them no good. Kissinger implicitly denies that he was responsible for the term “decent interval” to describe the period between an American pullout and North Vietnamese takeover. But Thieu, Nha and other savvy Southerners felt then, and in Nha’s case still contend, that an “elegant bug-out,” “a fig leaf,” was all the United States really wanted out of its negotiatons with the communists.
Indeed, the real issue for us in Vietnam was how to get the hell out. The issue for people like Nha was survival of their benighted country as a sovereign land. By that measure, we won and they lost.
I reached Nha by telephone and we agreed to meet in New York, where he works for the export sales and services division of GE. Nha is big for a Vietnamese, taller and stockier than most. In his Saigon salad days, when he was Thieu’s press secretary and therefore an important contact for an American reporter, I remember him as being taller then I was. Now, on a crowded street in midtown Manhattan, I discover that he is actually a good deal shorter.I remember Nha’s manner as haughty; this time he greets me warmly, even gratefully.
Nha, like so many other Vietnamese, fled in 1975. He joined GE two years later and commutes two hours a day from Stamford, Conn., where his wife and three children live in a condominium. He takes an immigrant’s considerable pride in having his family well settled and in the fact that he recently received a promotion. To his colleagues and neighbors, Nha says, he is just another Vietnamese. No one holds his background against him.
“We live in an Italian neighborhood,” Nha says. “There are battles for the kids over who invented spaghetti. We insist Marco Polo brought noodles back from the Orient.” His sons are in the Boy Scouts. His daughter takes music lessons.
So how does Nha feel now about being presented as despicable in what will doubtless be an authoritative record of the time?
“He gives me too much credit,” Nha says with a smile, adding: I take it as a compliment . . . Mr. Kissinger being the imperturbable, me extracting such reactions from him. That is quite a feat.”
Nha’s own account of what his role really was is modest to the point of probably being disengenuous: “As a good and efficient staffer of Mr. Thieu I only performed my duties to the fullest and as a Vietnamese in a critical moment, I outperformed myself in telling Mr. Thieu what were the pros and cons of everything concerning peace . . .”
In fact, despite his youth and nominal portfolio, press secretary and later minister of information, those of us in Saigon sensed that Nha was increasingly influential with his boss.The very quality of arrogance which drove Kissinger up the wall — a deep, cleareyed skepticism about U.S. motives — evidently became Nha’s biggest asset as the United States bore down on Thieu for a settlement. Toughness was necessary, Nha relates, because in his eagerness to get a pact, Kissinger was inclined to trample on South Vietnamese sensitivities.
For instance, at a critical meeting on Oct. 19, 1972, according to Nha, when Kissinger presented a draft agreement accepted by Hanoi and scheduled to go into effect only a few days later, Thieu and his aides were dumfounded that the text presented was in English and markedly different from the draft Bunker had led them to expect.
“There was no version in Vietnamese until we asked for it,” Nha reports. “I was joking with Mr. Theiu that if our opposition knew we were negotiating the fate of our country in a document in English, that would be very bad; just like asking the Israelis to negotiate their peace treaty in an Arabic text . . .
“And when we were handed that draft agreement which really had nothing to do with the other one Bunker gave to us, we were very surprised. But we kept our cool and Kissinger made the presentation. We listened to him politely and we just chatted. He said this was the best agreement we could get and that by signing this, the North Vietnamese will have accepted the collapse of their positions, a great thing for Vietnam and on and on.
“We said fine, we’re going to examine it. We went to lunch and I was given the assignment of poring over the text in English and at 3 o’clock we had the National Security Council convene and I told the assembly that in the space of two hour of reading the text in English, these are the major points I picked up.”
Kissinger and Nha’s times for the session do not coincide, but Kissinger does acknowledge that the next day Nha “went through a list of extremely intelligent questions” which subsequently formed the basis for Saigon’s demand that the accord be renegotiated. Over the next three months some changes were made but the fundamental accord remained the same. Kissinger was puzzled over Thieu’s “inability to grasp [the] opportunity” for peace.
Nha explains why Thieu and he were stalling:
“I thought the moment a peace agreement was signed we’d have more trouble, because, given the general nature of Communist activities in our area, there was for us more danger in peace than war.
“But we were also pragmatic. We knew from the beginning that we’d have to give in, that the process was irreversible. We held out for as long as possible and then we hoped for a new basis of support from the U.S. government. We thought Nixon could tell the Congress, ‘Look, these guys were willing to work out a peace accord. We should support them because the economy is a shambles and a lot of other things are wrong.'”
That never happened, of course, and on this point, Kissinger and Nha fully agree: Watergate and Nixon’s political weakness intervened. In the absence of substantial assistance from the United States, as assured in the peace bargaining, Nha admits that Saigon’s confidence snapped. “With Nixon’s resignation,” he says, “we knew that we were in a very, very difficult situation.”
“Outrageous,” “egregious” and “obnoxious”Hoang Duc Nha may have been, but in guessing the dire consequences for his country of Henry Kissinger’s determined bid for peace, Nha was right on the mark.
“P&P is not just a place to buy a book or sip an espresso, though I make it a point to do both every time I’m in the vicinity. It’s also the venue for a long-running, often high-end free show: the frequent author evenings in which scribblers give little speeches, answer unusually intelligent questions from members of a usually well-informed audience, and get their egos stroked.”
— Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker in June 2010, when the founders Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade put Politics and Prose, their bookstore in Washington, D.C., up for sale. He was worried, he wrote, that the store might close.
Fifteen years on, and now owned by Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, Politics and Prose is by any apparent measure flourishing. The main Connecticut Avenue store has increased in size by more than 25 percent. There are two additional stores at the Wharf and Union Market, two snazzy new retail neighborhoods in Washington.Foot traffic in all three locations is strong. Books are well displayed. At the coffee shop inside the Connecticut Avenue store, the customers, deep in conversations or engrossed on their laptops, tend to linger. There are events, some with standing-room-only turnouts, recorded for viewing on the P&P website and on YouTube. There are reading groups, classes, and even a few guided trips.
On any list of Washington’s community assets, the Politics and Prose stores are near the top.
One evening, after an event, as people came up to Brad to thank him for the store, he commented to me, “That never happened when I was a reporter.” Brad joined the Washington Post in the 1970s, where we were colleagues. He spent a decade as a foreign correspondent for the Post in Europe and was national security editor and then a Pentagon reporter on the national desk.
He wrote two books for PublicAffairs — Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack and By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld.
By nature and style, Brad is reserved, a person to be taken seriously. Lissa, a Rhodes Scholar who had also been a reporter at the Post and a senior member of Hillary Clinton’s staff at both the White House and the State Department is equally accomplished.
The point about all this description is that the owners of Politics and Prose are formidable and not inclined to self-congratulatory or celebratory proclamations about their achievements as booksellers.
So I decided to ask Brad about the enterprise as a business, assuring him that he could review my account to be sure it was accurate before it was published.
Here is some basic data. There are about 110 employees, including a chief financial officer and a chief operating officer who report to the owners. There are book buyers for adult and children’s categories, buyers for sidelines or merchandise, separate managers for the branch locations, events, marketing, programs, and the coffeehouse. There are around 530 in-store events a year, plus an additional 35 or so at outside venues to handle larger audiences. There are 12,000 “members,” who pay $35 a year, for discounts on purchases.
The staff is partially unionized. All three stores are in rented spaces: the Wharf store is in a building owned by Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, which also houses The Atlantic magazine, and the Union Market area is being developed by Edens, a national company with one hundred “open-air shopping centers and mixed- use retail assets,” which invited P&P to open a store as part of its “thoughtful community engagement and innovative property management.”
All well and good, but how is the business, meaning the revenues and profits that make it sustainable, and not (as Hertzberg once fretted in The New Yorker) vulnerable to the vagaries of commerce?
This is where Brad Graham’s seriousness comes into focus.
Brad’s family has a business background, and he earned an MBA at Stanford, but until acquiring P&P he had never used it. He was able to buy the store without going into debt to investors.
Here, in summary, is what he told me about how the numbers in bookselling are derived at P&P and generally in all independently owned bookstores, of which there are thousands in the United States.
Publishers mostly sell books to stores at about 54 percent of the list price. (Behemoths like Amazon and Barnes & Noble demand bigger discounts.) That means just under half the list price is where the revenue comes to pay the staff, rents, utilities, and capital improvements. The bottom line, says Brad, is a profit margin in the single digits — in good years. Most owners in the information and entertainment businesses would consider such a return on investment to be unacceptably paltry.
The largest percentage of store revenues comes from book sales, with “sidelines” merchandise (where profit margins are better than books) providing most of the rest. The economics of the coffeehouse is another matter, and only this year has it become profitable for P&P.
Put it all together and what have you got? In the case of Politics and Prose, unquestionably one of the best bookstores in the country, a stable enterprise but definitely not one to render its proprietors as moguls.
Why do it?
With all the people I encounter who I say are “Getting Things Done,” there is a common mission: making a meaningful contribution to civic society. And that is their major return on investment, which is why customers at P&P are thanking Brad and Lissa.
At my request, Jim Warren, who has spent decades in Chicago journalism and is an expert media observer sent me this selection of stories about the confrontation between the city’s leaders, residents, ICE and the Trump administration over immigration and crime. Also attached is an audio piece from the Columbia Journalism Review about coverage in Block Club, the leading digital start-up covering the city.
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In the heyday of its 178-year history the Chicago Tribune called itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” That braggadocio was never actually the case. But in the era when major metropolitan dailies were as important to city identities as major league sports franchises, the Tribune was, in fact, a great newspaper.
Because of the self-importance of the New York-Washington power corridor, where the New York Times and the Washington Post competed for the status of primus inter pares, the Tribune was never credited with the qualities of journalism, especially in reporting, features, and criticism, that it deserved.
I have followed the Tribune for years (especially when our son Evan worked there for a decade in Chicago, New York, the Middle East, and China). Two of its leading editors in heady times — Jim Squires and James O’Shea — authored books that I proudly published. As the Tribune began to falter in 2009, O’Shea, along with the former Washington bureau chief Jim Warren and a small group of other luminaries from the paper, launched the nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative, where I was involved in formulating the vision and fundraising.
CNC was ahead of its time as a concept for the development of digital-based local news coverage and ended when the leadership of its board of directors instead decided to buy the Chicago Sun-Times, deepening what was a business debacle afflicting all of Chicago’s once formidable news ecosystem.
Today’s Chicago Tribune, as a news enterprise, is a desiccated remnant of its notable past. It is owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that buys newspapers across the country, in a cynical ploy to make them profitable by reducing them, essentially, to real estate assets, with news-gathering operations that are a fraction of what they once were.
The Tribune’s news staff — which once numbered as many as 800, with eleven foreign bureaus and a Washington office of more than twenty — is now about 150 (maybe less). They do what they can to cover the metro area. National and international coverage is bought from wire services and syndicates. Many if not most of the features are written by freelancers. And the cohort of formidable cultural critics has been almost entirely eliminated.
A former sports editor said he had “62 full-timers when I started, plus a small army of prep stringers for all that zoned coverage we did. These days I’d be surprised if they had more than ten. I think they’re down to two on the Bears, one each on the Cubs, White Sox and Blackhawks…and no enterprise.”
As has happened across the country, an infrastructure of digital news outlets has evolved in the Chicago region, with the goal of developing nonprofit business models and sustained by local sponsorships and donations. The outstanding example has been the merger of WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio station, and the Chicago Sun-Times, which continues its tabloid traditions in format and emphasis.
By size and intention, this innovative combination of nonprofit media organizations is the most ambitious Chicago news source. Merging them is by general consensus still a work in progress. They are not comparable in range to the news coverage that was once provided by the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the long gone but once significant Chicago Daily News (especially famous in the 1930s and ’40s for its foreign coverage).
Block Club Chicago the most prominent start-up in hyperlocal coverage, is said to do a good job on meetings and features about neighborhoods, “but it never puts any wood on the ball,” as a former Tribune investigative reporter put it, lacking the resources for that in-depth work.
Jim O’Shea’s book The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers (link), published in 2011 by PublicAffairs, described the saga beginning in 2000 with the Tribune Company’s misbegotten acquisition of the Times Mirror Company and culminating in bankruptcy in 2008 after the real estate predator Sam Zell left the enterprise in tatters with about $13 billion in debt.
More mismanagement would follow, leading to today’s Alden Capital troth.
Watching this happen as the Chicago News Cooperative came together, I would question the many prominent Chicago real estate and financial leaders we were asking for money how much they wanted to reinvigorate Chicago news.
The short answer was not much. They said that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were sufficient to provide the national, international, and business reporting they wanted.
And in a city and state with enduring social, economic, and political problems, elites and too many elected officials seemed satisfied with what declining local coverage there was. The reality is that the powers that be find challenging journalism a nuisance and a hindrance to their interests.
So here is the irony of their attitudes.
This summer I attended a preseason football game at Soldier Field, between the Chicago Bears and the Miami Dolphins. It was a sell-out, with tens of thousands of fans adorned in Bears merch and unstinting in their enthusiasm, reflecting the extraordinary attachment Chicago has to its sports team. (Okay, I know local sports enthusiasms are pretty much ubiquitous.)
But long renowned as a metropolis second only in scale to New York, Chicago took exceptional pride because unlike Wall Street on one coast and Hollywood on the other, Chicago’s main identity was its own character, the rough and tumble City of the Broad Shoulders.
How does metropolitan Chicago maintain itself if it doesn’t really know what is happening — for better or worse — where its nearly nine million residents live?
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What if the Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Black Hawks et al Left Town?
Jim O’Shea held senior editorial positions in Chicago and later in Los Angeles, when the Times was owned by the Tribune Company, before leading the Chicago News Cooperative for as long as it lasted.
“In Los Angeles, the community had a strong commitment to a newspaper that reflected its image as a major metropolitan area…at local events, readers would harshly criticize the company and me for diminishing the Times.
“I never felt anything remotely like that in all my years in Chicago…the community just didn’t seem to care. In fact, most didn’t like the Trib for one reason or another…Ann Marie Lipinski (the executive editor of the paper at its peak strength) said that a business leader told her as the paper deteriorated, ‘We didn’t know what we had.’”
That is an major understatement.
In my most recent anecdotal reporting among Chicago area friends — the kind of people considered the mainstay of news consumers — I found that they are almost entirely digital readers, the New York Times leading the way, scrolling the internet, a podcast and a magazine or two, then a quick look at Chicago headlines. Block Club is usually mentioned.
“Well, don’t you want to know more about where you live, work, school your children, and walk the streets?” I ask.
The discouraging consensus is: Not really.
John Darnton, won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times coverage of Poland in the tumultuous years leading to the end of the Communist era. He is a bestselling novelist and author of the memoir “Almost a Family.”
Not far into In the Garden of Memory, a masterful family memoir by the Polish writer Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, I came across a passage that stopped me in my tracks. Janina Horwitz, the author’s irrepressible grandmother, who was denied entrance to Warsaw’s Imperial University because she was a woman, attends a “Flying University” in 1890. Olczak-Ronikier explains that this “clandestine institution” consists of “secret lectures given by the best university professors” in private homes in defiance of the tsarist authorities.
I had no need of the explanation. Nearly one hundred years later, covering Poland for the New York Times, I went to a number of Flying University sessions. They were still held in secret, still run by professors and still in private homes. Everyone knew about them – perhaps they were quietly tolerated by the wobbly communist bureaucrats. (Even Pope John Paul II, in his earlier incarnation as Karol Jozef Wojtyla, attended them.) Only now the classes were to thwart the historical lies of a different outside oppressor, the Soviet Union.
Plus ça change…
Historical continuity, and historical disconnections, are central to this powerful compilation of memories compiled by the granddaughter of a woman who was herself the granddaughter of a Viennese rabbi. It is largely the story of women: the great-grandmother, Julia, widowed early with nine children, and the grandmother, Janina, born in “the Congress Kingdom” – the Russian partition centered on Warsaw – who became an eminent high-end publisher of Polish literature. And her own mother and father.
The other members of the family spread throughout Europe, producing some notable achievers, such as the automobile entrepreneur named Citroën, but this particular branch of the family sank its roots in Poland. Hanging over everything is the irreducible fact that the family is Jewish.
The building blocks of recollection are hard to come by. Children are too self-centered to quiz their elders about the past. Books disappear, records go up in smoke, portraits are destroyed and piles of her grandmother’s notebooks are burned during the Warsaw Uprising. But somehow Olczak-Roniker manages to recreate and fully inhabit her family’s world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For much of that time, Poland had technically ceased to exist, except in peoples’ longings and imaginations, during the years of partition by Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
Questions abound. Why did this educated young man end up emigrating to Poland to labor as a scribe for a company exporting salt from the Polish mines? Why did the unconventional marriage of a spirited young woman fall apart in Paris? Why did one brother turn into a dyed-in-the-wool communist agitator? The author is often forced to speculate, but she does so with such magnanimity and intelligence that her deductions are credible.
Something about the book has touched a nerve in Poland, where it has become a bestseller. It may be because it depicts the crossroads and complicated decision making that befell people in those times, especially those on the outskirts of society. So many complications. What names do you give your children? Do you “Polonize” them? What language do you speak? Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish? What schools do you send them to? Where do you worship?
All these questions, of course, were stand-ins for the larger issues of assimilation and rejection. It was a time in which smaller questions merged into the overall question of who you were, and the answers you chose to give were often fateful.
This family chose assimilation. But their assimilation never truly succeeds. Writing of her mother’s birth certificate, recorded in the “registry for non-Christian denominations,” the author says she feels a sense of guilt. “Is it because I am being disloyal? I do not know. After all, my family never hid their ethnic origin, so I am not betraying any secrets, yet I am writing at some length about things they were reluctant to talk about. They were so proud of their Polishness that they preferred not to emphasize what a short distance separated them from the Jewish world they had run away from.”
This is not a Holocaust book. It does not end in tragedy. The family survives, the women living in the provinces under assumed names, the father in Warsaw with incriminating documents untouched in his desk. The act of recreating the lost world and the family that inhabited it was an act of self-preservation. “Maybe the time has come at last to rid myself of the genetically encoded sense of fear and shame that is hidden deep in my soul,” Olczak-Ronikier says. “It is high time to uncover the tracks and to resurrect the names of all those people who died so long ago.”
In Poland, perhaps more than in other countries, multiple histories coexist. There is the official history, proffered by the occupying power, riddled with lies. There is the underground history, passed along from mouth to mouth, which everyone knows is true.
When I lived in Warsaw, from 1979 to 1982, during the exhilarating years of Solidarity and the depressing years of martial law, the Soviet Union mandated the teaching of Russian in schools, pretended that communism had taken root organically, and insisted that it benefitted the Polish people. The people, however, yearned for the English of movies and rock music, knew that the Red Army had camped out across the river to let the Germans massacre the Home Army during the war, and felt economically exploited by the giant next door.
Then there’s the Jewish past, now completely wiped out. And the Polish romantic past – an amalgam of conspiracies and insurgencies, with snatches of poetry from Adam Mickiewicz, music by Chopin, and the fanatical nationalism that comes from living 123 years in a country not on any map.
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October 14 is the official on-sale date for “In the Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir.” It is available on order in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook formats from bookstores everywhere and online from Bookshop.org, Amazon and BN.com. This is the final piece in a Substack series about the book, including the translator’s introduction, an especially chilling excerpt and portraits from my additional research about the characters. There is much more to read at https://thegardenofmemory.com.
On Sunday, October 19 at 3 P.M. Antonia Lloyd-Jones and I will be in conversation about the book at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington.
The hyperventilation of the Trump era inspires analogies to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and fascism of every sort. But what may be the most precise description is how, in many ways, our country is coming to resemble post-Soviet Russia.
The USSR imploded in 1991, and for a decade or so it flailed in pursuit of a new identity. Then came Vladimir Putin, and over more than twenty years he has transformed Russia into what it has become today: belligerent, inequitable, and repressive, with a largely quiescent population.
The Russian populace has always tended toward submissiveness. It was a small revolutionary minority that toppled the tsar embraced Communism and until the 1980s virtually the entire population of the fifteen Soviet republics accepted their fate as vassals of the Kremlin.
American citizens have been much more influential, for better or worse, in the evolution of our society. Beginning with the Revolution, through the Civil War and the liberation and anti-war movements of the 1960s, our population has been instrumental in the shaping of the nation.
Until now.
Fifty percent or so of the electorate gave Donald Trump a second term as president, knowing the chaotic consequences of his first term: two impeachments, criminal indictments, and civil penalties unprecedented for the presidency. January 6, 2021, was a unique moment of historical violence, and in 2025 the perpetrators of that assault on democracy were pardoned.
Many important pillars of U.S. civil society — political, academic, media — have largely succumbed to Trump’s intimidation and edicts. While there have been periodic protest marches and some examples of resistance, the overriding reality is that MAGA has prevailed — and in some cases it has demolished or transformed seemingly immutable institutions of government, scholarship, and research and has undermined confidence in the meaning of truth.
How will we restore the constitutional checks and balances when they have been eliminated, with judicial and congressional acquiescence at the highest levels of leadership? Can the Pentagon, the State Department, Justice, Homeland Security, HHS, USAID, the CDC, and on and on be restored to their traditional roles? They were never by any means perfect, but now they have been transformed or obliterated.
And that is the comparison to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He has been repressing every facet of public and private life with impunity. He invaded Ukraine, determining to do away with a challenge to dominance of what he considered Russia’s rightful empire,
Internal Russian opposition to Putin has been neutralized in many instances in brazen fashion: the persecution and murder of the democratic activist Alexei Navalny and the assassination in the air of Putin’s maniacal rival Yevgeny Prigozhin are just two examples of the Russian president’s impunity.
Trump’s strategy of using executive powers and subordinated agencies of his administration to punish former antagonists and present critics is, for now, less directly lethal but nonetheless an egregious abuse of power.
And there is crony capitalism — Trump’s enrichment of himself and a selected cohort — that is shameless. Trump’s sons and the Kushner, Boulos, and Witkoff families are engaging in corruption so blatant, and in plain sight, that their predecessors in American life seem positively trivial. Remember the scandal of Billy Carter’s pathetic extraction of money from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya? Or Hunter Biden’s grief-stricken and alcoholic misadventures for which he was convicted and then pardoned by his father?
So why is such a vast swath of American society, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, from Congress to the universities, from the law firms to the media, accepting what is happening and even enabling it?
My sense is that the onslaught to our society is so relentless that the effect is numbing.
When I lived in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, most people there seemed to accept their fate and did what they could to live safe and relatively comfortable lives. In today’s Russia, from what we can see at a distance, this is still the case. If the casualty estimates from the Ukraine war are close to accurate, more than a million Russian families have suffered the loss of young men, dead, wounded, or permanently scarred in pursuit of Putin’s objectives, and his alone.
Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Vladimir Putin was, at least initially, elected to the presidency of Russia. But neither man was given a popular mandate for autocracy and a modern version of dictatorship — certainly not Trump.
That is why what is happening in the United States is so unfathomable. In our 250th year as a nation, is this really what Americans want as our destiny?
Of course not. What, then, are we going to do about changing the trajectory?
Repression, injustice, and discrimination were in the past alleviated by popular will but never really disappeared. They are being revived. The U.S. role in the world was intended to ensure security and democratic norms, again with imperfect results.
But never before have Americans accepted tyranny as a way of life. Which is why the present United States of Putinism has to be seen for what it is: undoubtedly the greatest test of popular will this country has faced in the memories of every last one of us.
Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award, In the Garden of Memory is a memoir on the family of Peter Osnos.
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland’s most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of one of the country’s most illustrious clans, noted for its achievements in business, politics, and culture-as they lived, struggled, and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century.
Rich with tales of bravery as well as poignant, sometimes comic anecdotes of everyday life, the book follows the family members as they scattered around the world to European spas, tsarist prisons, Soviet war camps, and the Royal Air Force. Tracing their roots to a renowned Austrian rabbi, the family members included an array of amazing characters. One became an industrial magnate who founded the Citro n automobile company in France; another was a Communist revolutionary who ended up being arrested, tortured, and executed by Stalin’s police. One worked as an undercover agent, another as a zoologist in France. One became a notable Polish publisher, another a leading Freudian psychiatrist.
Inevitably, the tragic history of the Second World War and its catastrophic impact on European Jews looms darkly over the narrative, yet remarkably enough only two members of the clan were killed in the Holocaust. Today the survivors have continued the family journey around the world, including in the United States. Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, In the Garden of Memory is ultimately the uplifting account of a family that never gave up hope and never gave in.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
Lloyd-Jones will be in conversation with Peter L.W. Osnos, the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. His most recent book is LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, he spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Columbia School of Journalism, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Bethesda, MD.
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Date:Sun, 10/19/2025
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Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland’s most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of…
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Publish Date: 10/14/2025
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Baghdad, 1940. A shabby hotel in a chaotic city. Jozef, Marta, and Robert Osnos arrived, desperate for a place to stay. The proprietor noted their Polish passports and disappeared for a moment.
“He came back with a tall slender man who said in Polish, ‘What’s going on?’ then something in Arabic, then again in Polish, then arranged to have a room for everybody and promised to come to our quarters later to explain everything. That was John the Savior! He played a main role in our flight and my warmest feelings he will have forever.”
–From Marta Osnos’s memoir, Exodus: From Occupied Warsaw to Bucharest, Istanbul, Baghdad and Finally, Safety in Bombay
*********************************
To survive in the mayhem of World War II in Europe, especially if you were Jewish, meant some combination of miracles — a composite of luck, courage, guile, and coincidence.
Jozef, Marta, and Robert’s arrival in Baghdad was months into their journey from Poland, and at every stop there were great dangers and fateful encounters that enabled them to press on. In Bucharest there was an earthquake that terrified Robert even more than the bombing of Warsaw had, he would say. But in a garden behind their hotel Jozef met the Turkish ambassador, who had also rushed outside from a neighboring building. After talking to Jozef in French, he arranged a transit visa to Turkey. They still had to cross Syria, until finally, exhausted, they arrived in Baghdad.
Enter John Miś, a Pole who had turned up in Baghdad and was working as a language teacher at Markaziyah College. I recently did an extensive online search, with the help of researchers in Britain, that revealed some details of his life, but much of his personal background remains a mystery. He was not Jewish, and so leaving Poland was a choice. Why was he in Baghdad? To the eternal benefit of my family, he had connections at the British consulate and also with the Japanese, who in 1940 would still give travel visas to selected European refugees.
Mish (the English spelling of his Polish surname) was born in 1909 in the part of Poland that had been incorporated into Prussia in the late eighteenth century. He received a doctorate in languages in Berlin in 1934, speaking Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, and Malay on his way to fluency years later in more than thirty Asian languages.
After helping the family find a hotel room and arrange essential doctor visits, Mish guided them toward the British consulate, where they learned that with a transit visa to Bombay, they’d be allowed to stay for the duration of the war. This all sounds much more straightforward than in fact it probably was. In wartime, everything is hard.
The family made it to Bombay and began to reassemble their shattered lives. A year later, according to my mother’s memoir, Mish turned up in Bombay working for the Indian government in some intelligence-related capacity. Exactly what that meant I don’t know, nor apparently did my mother. The files that would describe his exact position are in London and still not readily available for examination.
The clearest explanation of his wartime work comes from a list of ten Poles who in 1946 received the King’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom. He is described as a “Chinese Intelligence Officer, Criminal Investigating Department, Bombay.”
King George VI instituted the award in 1945, “to recognise foreign nationals, mainly civilians of allied countries, who had given meritorious service in furtherance of the interests of the British Commonwealth in the allied cause during the Second World War.” The medal was awarded only 2,539 times.
In the reams of scholarship about Indian intelligence activities during the war, one summary is called “Indian Contributions to Intelligence and Espionage.”
“The British colonial administration had established intelligence networks to monitor nationalist movements and repress dissent,” the report said.
My guess is that Mish was a translator and analyst of Chinese and Japanese material gathered from surveillance or by on-the-ground espionage.
After the war ended in 1945, Mish stayed in Bombay for another year before arriving in New York, where he became director of the Oriental and Slavonic divisions at the New York Public Library. When he died in August 1983, he had received sufficient stature to merit a full obituary in The New York Times. “Under his leadership, and in a joint acquisition program with the Library of Congress and other institutions, the Oriental collection grew to include documents from North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines,” the paper wrote. “The collection was particularly notable for its material on the modern vernacular languages of India and its Japanese scientific and technical journals.”
Mish married an American journalist named Lucy Kent, became an American citizen, and adopted a son. The family lived in Bronxville, New York. I was told he was a man of consequence to our family but never really understood why.
A 1973 profile in the New York Daily News said, “Last year, he began receiving Chinese classics and non-propaganda from Hong Kong and then from Mainland China. He concluded correctly that the cultural revolution, the violent upheaval started by Mao in 1966, was over.” This was a crucial insight for policy makers in Washington.
Thinking about it now, I suppose discovering that Mish was undercover in Baghdad for Britain’s MI6 and doing cloak-and-dagger spying in Bombay would have added some spice to my sense of the man whom my parents clearly admired.
That did not emerge in my research about him. But his role as a savior to my parents and brother in the midst of their frenetic trek from Europe — they finally made it to the United States in 1944 with me in a basket — secured him a distinctive mention in Joanna Olzcak-Ronikier’s account of luck, courage, miracles, and valor in the lives of our family.
This is John Mish in New York after his arrival at the end of the war.
Baghdad, 1940. A shabby hotel in a chaotic city. Jozef, Marta, and Robert Osnos arrived, desperate for a place to stay. The proprietor noted their Polish passports and disappeared for a moment.
“He came back with a tall slender man who said in Polish, ‘What’s going on?’ then something in Arabic, then again in Polish, then arranged to have a room for ever…
I could claim it was a test of close readership of my pieces or, as been asserted in instant commentary, an example of misogyny. But having found a great picture of the group with the esteemed African-American Ed Bradley, and the talented beyond imagining Diane Sawyer, I was too busy patting my self on the back to properly proofread the caption.
With apologies.
And here is a bonus excerpt from Don Hewitt’s “Tell Me A story”:
“Not long after Ed signed on my secretary, Beverly Morgan, came into my office and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ What she had in her hand was a memo from Ed to the personnel office at CBS informing them that he was changing his name to ‘Shaheeb Sha Hab.’….
“ ‘Is he kidding?, ‘I asked Beverly.
“‘I don’t think so,’ she said,’the memo has already gone to personnel.”
Hewitt, swallowed hard and realizing he could not tell Bradley what to call himself. He thought it best to place a call to Kay Gardella, a columnist at the Daily News and let her break the news.
“Thats when Bradley cracked up, ‘Hang up,’ he said, ‘Tell her you’ll call her back.” And he burst out laughing. Shaheeb Sha Had indeed.”
That was then. This is now.
