“Eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
An executive order from the White House on March 14 mandated the dismantling of “elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary.”
I was particularly interested in the United States Agency for Global Media, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution. I knew their impact from experience.
Other institutions had already been targeted, reduced in size or stature, or closed altogether, including USAID; the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; and the Department of Education.
These agencies were all in one way or another established to enhance the life and/or spirits of Americans and people around the globe, where the “indispensable nation” (as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the United States) is meant to provide support and social services.
What they do not do is expand the autocratic powers of the executive or enrich moguls and his family, the priorities that are the focus of Donald Trump’s presidency. In effect, a firing squad has been established for the losing side in MAGA’s takeover of politics and how we live.
Is there a strategic vision for what has been happening, a gospel or creed, like Marxism or National Socialism (the scourges of the twentieth century), or protection of our democracy, the avowed objective of every president since Washington?
No, all of this of is an amalgam of the instincts of one man and his relentless pursuit of retribution against those who underestimated him or laughed at him, because in so many ways he had been laughable. And if he thinks that what these agencies do is “unnecessary,” why should Americans pay for them?
(I should add that no matter how cleverly Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, et al., skewer him now, what he’s doing to the country is definitely not laughable, even if you think what he’s doing is right.)
I have to wonder how many of the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 did so to crush the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, or the Open Technology Fund.
To anyone who did vote for that reason: Congratulations, you have been successful.
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The “radios,” as they are collectively known — even though they are (or were) available in latter-day formats like video, podcasts, and the internet — began during World War II and continued into the Cold War. They expanded to other regions of particular importance as U.S. interests evolved.
I came to know them well during my time working in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Washington. Because my stories in the Washington Post were translated and broadcast over the radios in Russian and other languages, correspondents like me were the “free press” in countries where there was none. (I described what that was like in this short piece.
The Voice of America by tradition was non-ideological, meaning that while it was an American voice, its programming avoided rhetoric and propaganda. For many years, ending in 2003, VOA’s most popular program was Willis Conover’s jazz hour, and jazz continued to be a mainstay. VOA correspondents, wherever I knew them, were excellent and bristled at the suggestion that because they were employees of a government agency, they were suspect in some way. (I was not a listener to the dozens of foreign language programs but was told that they maintained standards similar to the English-language ones.)
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were different. They were established specifically to broadcast to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. The staffs were primarily exiles or area specialists. After it was disclosed in 1967 that both stations were funded by the CIA, their resources came from congressional appropriations.
RFE/RL was also a research organization and produced reams of material — notably reliable — about the countries it covered.
Leadership of the radios tended to reflect the U.S. presidential administrations, as they came and went. Edward R. Murrow was director of what was then called the United States Information Agency and oversaw the VOA in the Kennedy years. I looked at the list of VOA and RFE/RL directors over the decades. A number were my friends, and I can vouch for their distinction in journalism.
The history of the radios has not always been smooth. Any institution dependent on government funding and the goodwill of politicians is at risk from changing moods and interests. In Trump’s first term, his emerging animus led to the appointment of a loyalist hack, who left in disgrace.
The executive order of March 14 eliminating soft government agencies is now being tested in litigation. The remnants of the radios are doing what they can. At least the United States has a court system. Russia and China, which maintain massive and slick global propaganda media, face no such obstacles. Doing away with values and voices means a much-diminished United States, here, there, and everywhere.
In the midst of what is AI mania — considered more disruptive than the twentieth century’s television and computer takeovers and the explosive arrival of the internet — there is another less noticeable phenomenon around today: the endurance of analog, which I think of, less technically, as tradition.
There has been data accumulating for some time, but it was the revelation that Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl sold 1.334 million vinyl records in its first week that conclusively made the point. The total of all album downloads was about four million.
As a book publisher, I was prepared for the digital transformation that took place around the turn of the millennium. The results are now in. Seventy percent of books are bought in print, ebooks are about 20 percent, and audiobooks (the fastest growing sector) are 10 percent of sales. Even among younger readers, from all accounts print is the decisive favorite. Turns out that growing up reading Harry Potter books and now following Tik Tok recommendations has been a major plus for old-fashioned turning of pages.
Over the summer, for my first ever foray there, I went on eBay to buy vintage polo shirts because newer versions have less cloth and fast fashion lasts barely a single season. Then In The New York Times I learned there is a boom in the sale of vintage clothing, including among younger style-setters.
Another Times story (this news purveyor is definitely no longer its former fuddy-duddy self) reported, surprisingly, that broadcast media is where live shows, mainly big-time sports events, are drawing audiences and advertising that streamers are trying to match. Cable and networks are in decline, but they still pay a lot of bills.
Following up, I wrote to A.G. Sulzberger, the Times’s publisher, to ask about the print newspaper as a business asset since the daily circulation is now so small a fraction of the global digital circulation. “Yes,” he answered, “print is still profitable, comfortably so.”
He explained: “I’m a big believer that the next new thing never fully replaces the last big thing. But also, that the last thing tends to decline — more slowly than conventional wisdom — until it reaches a steady state among niche devotees.”
Here is what else I have noticed. Hollywood now considers launching movies “only in theaters” as code for “this is a major motion picture” whereas going straight to streaming is a signal that a film is of lesser importance. Small screen is just not big screen or an IMAX extravangza, which has expanded significantly.,
A musical about Bobby Darin (who died in 1973) is Broadway’s biggest hit this fall. Tickets are going for $700.Podcasts are radio programming on demand, which the pervasive use of earbuds have made omnipresent. Walls, bulletin boards, and lampposts are covered in printed announcements of events, political slogans, and lost pets. Old-fashioned photo booths, where teenagers squeezed in decades ago and made funny faces, have reappeared in malls.
Yes, your “phone” is indispensable, although texting in bursts far exceeds making calls. Social media is dominant in spreading information, falsehoods, and corrosive messages. Everyone of all ages, from toddlers to oldsters, is connected.
There is, however, reason to believe we are reaching a turning point in which resistance to bombardment by stimuli is being mandated or personally chosen. Outside my apartment window is Bethesda Row, a pedestrian pathway among downtown buildings lined with restaurants, cafes, and, significantly, lots of seating around firepits on chilly fall evenings. This is a popular destination for teens, families and anyone with an urge for in-person experiences.
Of course, there are phones everywhere, but the good time vibe is traditional.
Shopping online is unquestionably convenient. Strolling weekend farmers’ markets is much more fun and very popular with buyers wherever I see them. They can also be lucrative for sellers. They are, in their way, another reassuring reminder of the benefits of casual experiences.
(Here is where there needs to be a disclaimer about how shopping and entertainment are enjoyed by people with the means to pay for them, which too many Americans seem not to have. Acknowledged.)
Sports in schools and community teams, from pee-wees to varsity, have never been bigger now that girls have a full share and more. Traditionalists are appalled by what has happened to college sports which has become more a business than a competition among amateurs. Watching sports at home is great and more Americans are doing that than ever because of the popularity of soccer, gymnastics etc.. But seeing games in person is unforgettable, especially because tickets are so expensive.
I have my own measure of what people still take seriously in journalism. Write a piece for the online version of a magazine with a significant print circulation, of which there are some of note, and people will invariably ask, “But will it be in the magazine also?” Still, I am committed to writing for digital readers, on Substack these days. Stars who made their names in print —Tina Brown, for example — are attracting large (and paying) audiences.
If something of mine appears in print, the books I have been writing, the sensation of seeing the pages is different from my digital output, and I’d wager a great many people who write regularly would agree with me. Letters delivered by snail mail, because they are so unusual, will get attention that email does not — and are likely to be remembered.
We all seem to agree that AI is a very big deal and while a crash of one kind or another is inevitable with consequential regrets, I am equally convinced that the benefits of what is time-honored are nowhere near over or ever will be.
Harder than it looks.
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Consider the fates of these men:
John F. Kennedy — Assassinated.
Lyndon B. Johnson — Broken in spirit by Vietnam.
Richard Nixon — Resigned rather than be impeached.
Gerald Ford — Never elected.
Jimmy Carter — Defeated after one term.
Ronald Reagan — Badly wounded in an attempted assasination at the outset. Key aides considered removal via the Twenty-fifth Amendment at the end.
George H. W. Bush — Defeated after one term.
Bill Clinton — Impeached.
George W. Bush — Left behind two wars, one of choice.
Barack Obama — Promise unfulfilled. Rolled by the GOP.
Donald J. Trump — Chaotic, impeached, and defeated.
Joe Biden — Defeated and humiliated.
Donald J. Trump — To be determined.
There are a great many reasons for this pattern which historians and political savants will be pondering as they consider how Trump has so far defied every challenge to his ascendancy and power.
Here’s an explanation to debate: The principles that frame our politics — ideologies and beliefs — have come undone, replaced by messes of confusion, corruption, and a debilitating crisis of leadership.
The Grand Old Party is in thrall to Donald Trump’s brand of self-serving nationalism, which uses tariffs, taxpayer money, and the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to violate the rights of Americans, from the once powerful to those least able to defend themselves.
The Heritage Foundation, where the blueprint for Trump’s second term, Project 2025, was developed, is now in turmoil, unwilling or unable to distance itself from Nick Fuentes, an avowed antisemite whose interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast was heard by millions.
Two thirds of New York City’s Jewish voters, long the bastion of Democrats voted against Zorhan Mamdani in his successful race for Mayor in large part because he has reviled Israel. The Gaza war — and the resulting surge in antisemitism — has split American Jews so profoundly it is hard to fathom how they can be reconciled in support for the Jewish state..
The Democratic Party of the working class is now the home of coastal elites. Our former presidents have done remarkably well in their retirements. The Clintons summer in the Hamptons and the Obamas have estates in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii.
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I have just read The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn, after having heard the author’s fascinating interview on Brian Lamb’s podcast Booknotes+. Meyer went from youthful Communist Party membership to “naming names” of his former comrades, and becoming one of the mainstays of William F. Buckley’s magazine National Review.
The biography of Meyer and Sam Tanenhaus’s massive new biography of Buckley describe in detail how the conservative political movement came together around anti-communism and limiting the role of government in social and economic policy. There was a philosophical basis for that strategy, avowedly opposed to the precepts known as socialism.
Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is not conservative by any accepted use of the term, as defined by Buckley and Meyer.
It is absurd to call Mamdani a “communist,” as Trump has done, especially when today’s ruler in the Kremlin is Vladimir Putin, whose tenure shows that Karl Marx’s vision for the triumph of popular will failed completely in reality.
Mamdani’s “socialism” is better framed as idealism, a renewed effort to improve the lives and lot of the urban citizenry, where minorities once discriminated against are now increasingly in charge.
Here’s an upside comment. The resounding gubernatorial victories of Abigail Spanberger, formerly of the CIA, in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill, retired military, in New Jersey demonstrate that success for women in politics is (almost) complete.
Spanberger defeated Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, a Republican who is Black. Coincidentally the election took place in the same week that former Vice President Dick Cheney died. Cheney, the GOP stalwart, was the architect of the Bush-era War on Terror who, in his last vote, chose Kamala Harris, a woman of color, for president over the Republican standard-bearer.
Liz Cheney, his daughter, is a Republican apostate for her stance against Trump and received the John F. Kennedy Library’s Profile in Courage award in 2022. This year the award was given to former Vice President Mike Pence, in recognition of his actions on January 6, 2021. A Kennedy who was not present at the ceremony was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services at Trump’s right hand.
Right. Left. Liberal. Conservative. Progressive. Reactionary, Fascist. Communist. What do all these labels actually mean now?
The longtime goal of the country’s two parties was to maintain a “Big Tent,” which in the past meant that Democrats included segregationists from the Solid South and at the same time labor and social activists from the northern cities. Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, as recently as the 1980s was the home of iconic liberals like Senator Jacob Javits of New York and Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland.
That American presidents are as vulnerable to the vagaries of circumstance as the record shows, is not just because our principles and politics have gotten so messy. But when the parameters of American life are polarized and in so many ways contradictory, it turns out that to be a leader carries exceptional risks which — as has happened repeatedly — overwhelms their power.
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
Time:3:00pm
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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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