Watching Donald Trump ride the wave of The Art of the Deal in the 1980s as the book’s editor, I was amazed by his self-discipline, especially when it came to alcohol. We did not exchange confidences, but I was told his older brother Fred’s descent into alcoholism and his death at age forty-two had a profound effect on him.
In the orbit of cigar smokers, I never saw him smoke. And he was disgusted by detritus. The only time I saw him lose his temper was when a freelance photographer glued black garbage bags on the ceiling of his Trump Tower office.
He threw him out.
On the day in 1990 when The Wall Street Journal reported he was billions of dollars in debt, I was flying east from Las Vegas with him on his private jet. He canoodled with his paramour Marla Maples, seemingly without a care in the world.
So far in this second presidency, Trump’s personal flailing and blustering demeanor are its main characteristics. Whatever else is on display, it is not self-discipline.
This series is about people who while fully aware of the upheavals underway in so many institutions —government, media, education, business and NGOs — have personalities that enable them to confront challenges which have engulfed this era — and get things done.
In 1992, Lev Sviridov was ten years old. His mother, Alexandra, worked on a Russian investigative television show called Top Secret, exposing KGB agents in the early post-Soviet years. After an apparent poisoning and other harassments, her colleagues urged her to leave the country for short-term fellowships in the U.S. and Canada.
A year later, Alexandra and Lev were scheduled to return to Moscow when an unsuccessful coup was launched against Boris Yeltsin with tanks in the streets. Lev says he pleaded with his mother for them to stay in the United States. He still has their unused Aeroflot tickets.
For the past twelve years, Lev Sviridov has been the director of Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, in the City University of New York system. Each year 120 applicants are chosen for guaranteed free tuition, extensive counseling, and other benefits. The acceptance rate, he says, is less than 10 percent.
Overall, Hunter enrolls about 17,000 undergraduates.
Sviridov was an acquaintance when he invited me to interview Macaulay applicants in tandem with undergraduates, and to rate the applicants’ potential. To get an interview, high school seniors should have an excellent academic record. To be selected, they need to be exceptional.
Being a college administrator in this contentious era is a high-risk career. Sviridov seems to relish the job, and the students seem to return the enthusiasm.
(Caveat: I guarantee I could uncover grumbling at Macaulay, but the upside prevails. When every institution seems to be grappling with the impact of political clashes and social norms, something of it is doubtless happening at Macaulay, but it is not — nearly as I can judge — the dominant mood as it is elsewhere.)
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With the encouragement of well-intentioned American friends, Lev was accepted with a scholarship to the private Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale, where, he says, he was miserable — an immigrant, economically and socially consigned to the minority outsider group of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.
(Though the Sviridovs have a Jewish background, they were not part of the wave of Soviet Jewish emigration of the 1970s and ’80s. Their passports listed their nationality as “Russian” and not “Jewish,” the case with those earlier arrivals, an identifier they understood to reflect a deep-seated Russian antisemitism.)
After a period of what Sviridov calls essentially homelessness and couch-surfing, Alexandra won a $5,000 grant from the literary estate of Lillian Hellman, enough to rent a comfortable apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, which Lev describes as “transformational.”
When it came to college, Lev chose City College not wanting, he says, to repeat the sense of exclusion he felt at Fieldston. And there he flourished. As a chemistry major he received a Barry Goldwater Scholarship, intended to courage a career in research science. He was also elected president of the student body.
On a web search during his senior year, he encountered the Rhodes Scholarships and noticed that the application deadline was a week away. The Rhodes at Oxford has always been associated with elite status — traditionally for “athletes, scholars and gentlemen.”
By then, the Rhodes was co-educational. And Sviridov was a scholar. But an athlete?
For more than twenty years, Lev has been a regular in fast-pitch softball games in Central Park. “I thought that if I could just get in the room for an interview, I’d be fine,” he said, which happened. Lev Sviridov was finding his way.
He spent four years at Oxford, earning a DPhil in inorganic chemistry. To supplement his scholarship, he worked as an assistant at the London office of the law firm Skadden Arps, where the managing partner, the legendary Joe Flom, had also attended City College.
Returning to New York, Lev was working in a CCNY lab when he caught the eye of Dr. Judith Friedlander, a senior administrator at Hunter, and the college’s president, Jennifer Raab. They told him that the director of the Macaulay program at Hunter was departing, and Sviridov’s appearances at several City University public events had led them to offer him the job.
That was 2014.
I asked him when he had started truly feeling as if he was an American. He replied: In 2004, when he received his citizenship — twelve years after his arrival.
“And your mother?” In 2022, he said, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, and she finally accepted that she could never return to Moscow.
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Macaulay Honors College was founded in 2001 and was named after William E. Macaulay, a CCNY graduate who was chairman of the First Reserve Corporation, a major private equity fund. In 2006, he donated $30 million to City University to endow scholarships and other student funding for the Honors College program and to finance the purchase of a building at 35 West 67th Street to be the hub for the Macaulay programs at eight colleges in the CUNY system. Hunter’s program is the largest. Macaulay died in 2019.
Lev’s role at Macaulay, aside from leadership, is, in a word, “mentoring.” The accepted students, he says tactfully, tend to arrive as “diamonds in the rough,” with accomplishments and a readiness to take on the next phase of their lives.
They are given a senior counselor with the expectation that this person will be advising them for the full four years. One of these counselors, Charlotte Glasser, described her efforts as providing “social capital” — the capacity to accommodate the social, economic, and cultural challenges they will face as they evolve from adolescence.
Glasser said: “Most of these kids come from large bustling public schools. Many balance additional jobs, research labs, and volunteering as they earn straight A’s, communicating by subway long hours every day … They navigate the additional challenges of a public university, while at the same time, exploring the many opportunities in New York … that will fine tune their academic trajectories and career goals.”
I have no idea whether any of the high schoolers I interviewed will be accepted, but they all had a quality once described to me as SWAN — smart, works hard, ambitious, nice. At the end of every interview, I extended a fist bump and a comment about how impressed I was.
Lev Sviridov’s background qualifies him to closely identify with the students and gain their trust when disputes arise — as they did in the spring of 2024 over the Israel-Hamas war. Were there tensions? Yes. Did they create conflicts like those that cost the presidents of so many universities their jobs? No.
Sviridov has a belief in the students who make it to Macaulay Honors College — and based on his own experience, a belief in himself. That is how he is so able to get things done.
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Gina Raimondo, the subject of the first installment of this series, and Lev Sviridov were both Rhodes Scholars. Established in 1902 by the will of the British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes and located at Oxford University, the program has always been identified with privilege and controversial exclusiveness. But that has changed over the years. Raimondo and Sviridov both were high achievers from modest backgrounds.
I heard Chelsea Clinton characterize the modern Rhodes well when she told her father, Bill (himself a recipient), that she would not apply for one. Were she chosen, she said, it would be for what she already was, the daughter of a president and an outstanding student at Stanford. The fellowships should go not for what the applicants already are, but to support them to become what they could be.
She paid her own way at Oxford.
Jeff Bezos’s announcement on Elon Musk’s X that henceforth the Washington Post’s editorials and its opinions section will be devoted exclusively to issues of personal liberties and free markets means that the enterprise will reflect only his personal values and vision – or else. David Shipley, the opinions editor, resigned.
Bezos wrote:
I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning: I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job. I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity. I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction. I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void. Jeff.
The Post’s situation has been a matter of mostly fretful attention since the rumors and then the revelation that it was losing money, the upheavals around Will Lewis’s hiring as publisher and especially since Bezos killed the presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris and the now departing Shipley’s refusal to run an Ann Telnaes’s editorial cartoon mocking Bezos’s obsequious pivot to the Trump era.
What now?
The endorsement flap cost the Post 250,000 subscribers. Whatever else this announcement about the opinions section will do, it will not solve the financial issues – and will almost certainly make them worse.
So take the business crisis off the table. Bezos paid $250 million for the Post and whatever he has invested since is a pittance of what he can afford.
Jeff, reap the losses you incur, and you can do whatever you want with the Washington Post.
This bottom line is ignominious. However, it is the result of what Jeff Bezos’s ownership now demands.
Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election was a landslide. He won forty-four states to Jimmy Carter’s six. The Republicans flipped twelve Senate seats, gaining a majority for the first time since 1955, and added thirty-four seats in the House, although the Democrats still held a majority.
Because of the scale of his win and his avowedly conservative commitment to overhaul government spending and social policies, the “Reagan Revolution” became the term to describe what would be happening in his administration — the reversal, finally, of the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
What actually happened in the early months of that year was recounted in William Greider’s Atlantic Monthly article, “The Education of David Stockman” in which the thirty-four-year-old director of the Office of Management and Budget portrayed to Greider (then an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post), the process by which the revolution confronted the reality of politics.
The article was a sensation. After it ran, Stockman ruefully acknowledged that President Reagan had taken him to the “woodshed” but did not fire him for sharing the truth. Reagan’s lofty commitment to cutting the size of government never happened; instead, military spending was increased and the national debt soared into the multiple trillions. It was only when Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve imposed high interest rates to drive the country into recession that inflation dropped to acceptable levels.
(An aside: The assassination attempt against Reagan on March 30, 1981, which left him badly wounded — combined with his quip to a despairing Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck” — provided a positive personal aura that largely endured for his two terms.)
As the scale and style of Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s intentions have unfolded in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency — taking on the Constitution and the federal workforce with a vengeance — I wondered what Stockman now thought of those objectives. I subscribed to David Stockman’s Contra Corner (a pricey $365 annual subscription) and found that the one-time boy wonder is now fierce in his judgments, data driven, and scary in his predictions, wherever you are on the political spectrum.
Here is an excerpt from February 10:
“There has a been decent outpouring of good stuff…bulls eye hits like the Donald’s ixnay on paper straws, the penny, the global climate hoax, DEI idiocy, green energy boondoggles…the rat hole of waste at USAID. Beyond that, turning the enormously gifted and committed Elon Musk loose on the Deep State bureaucracy is in itself a remarkable stroke for sanity…
“Unfortunately, we’re getting a lot of foul balls in the form of random attacks on the US trade accounts, the US labor force and America’s already wobbly fiscal foundations. And that’s to say nothing of utter stink bombs like annexing Greenland and Canada, standing up a Sovereign Wealth Fund, retaking the Panama Canal and occupying and rebuilding a Palestinian-free Gaza Strip….
“Most of this list…is going to lead to big time trouble that is almost impossible for fully imagine. Particularly the Donald’s unhinged wars on imports and immigrants could actually turn an already weak, debt-entombed national economy into a veritable basket case.”
Take that, dear subscriber.
So, the Reagan Revolution’s objectives have become the mayhem of Trump and Musk. This is the French Revolution of 1789 becoming the Committee of Public Safety, renamed for our time as the Department of Government Efficiency. You may remember that Robespierre and his cohort were eventually executed.
The fate of Trump and Musk and the United States is at stake. And speaking of stakes, whose heads will eventually roll as the consequences of what they are doing are fully realized?
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One of the most brutal (cruel will also work) of the Trump-Musk actions is the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to direct and fund foreign assistance programs in a variety of areas, including health, education, governance, economic development, environmental protection, and disaster relief. In the 2023 fiscal year, USAID’s “total obligations” were $43.4 billion.
The agency’s name was immediately removed from its headquarters, letter by letter, and nearly all of the more than ten thousand employees defenestrated. Our friends with sons and daughters who have made notable careers in places like the Departent of Justice and USAID see their lives in shambles.
The most vituperative public response to what was happening with USAID came from Andrew Natsios, who was USAID administrator in the George W. Bush years and who describes himself as, avowedly, a Republican conservative. On the PBS News Hour he said: “It’s not a takeover. It’s a destruction of the agency.” He added that people at USAID and the agency’s grant recipients are “appalled.” And then he went on CBS’s 60 Minutes and said it again and more.
Natsios said that each administration would move USAID policies from “left” to “right” as standard practice. But the pivots in American social and political policies in every respect have become more pronounced in recent years, undermining effective change.
Trump-Musk is another scale altogether.
A Financial Times poll last week found that almost “60 percent of [American] respondents agreed that funds set aside for humanitarian causes were ‘wasted on corruption or administration fees.’ Only 12 percent disagreed with that proposition.”
Whatever problems foreign assistance has had — and there are doubtless experts from all perspectives on these — the undisputed fact is that since the 1960s, virtually every meaningful measure of global livelihood has improved. World Bank and United Nations numbers report that global poverty has decreased by more than a billion people over that span.
The rhetoric around crises is so overused that it has largely lost its meaning. But the summary abolition of USAID’s programs is a crisis and cruel.
The Reagan Revolution happened forty-five years ago. In Reagan’s era, the main menace was communism. Then after 9/11 it became terrorism. In the 2024 election cycle, “woke” posed the perceived threat to the American way of life.
If you or anyone you know is around in 2070, ask them what the Trump-Musk period accomplished.
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As this Substack enters its fourth year, it becomes Peter Osnos PublicAffairs Press, adapting for the digital age the name Morris B. Schnapper called his independent Washington D.C., enterprise from the 1930s to the 1980s and featuring the eagle he affixed to communications.
In the coming months, this series will feature people of notable accomplishment. The focus is on how they manage to get hard things done, rather than just what those were.
My objective is to decipher the qualities of personality and character that overcome obstacles of logistics, competing interests and constituencies, media criticism and funding to reach their goals.
These successes do not generally come with fame and fortune. In fact, they are especially impressive because the rewards are not as tangible as celebrity or money.
One quality I have identified is “oblivious confidence,” an inherent sense that achievement is possible — and that arrogance and bullying are not the same traits as self-confidence, in fact quite the opposite. I have a list of people I’d like to write about who have agreed to let me do so. They are all busy, so it takes time to connect.
Gina Raimondo, whom I interviewed on her last day as secretary of commerce in the Biden administration, is the first in this series.
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Gina Raimondo has a resume that qualifies her as one of the elites that in our era are considered out of touch with the needs of real people. Harvard BA. Yale JD. Rhodes scholarship. Governor of Rhode Island. Secretary of commerce.
But Raimondo’s story shows the fallacy of assumptions. She comes from a working-class, Roman Catholic, Italian-American family in Rhode Island, and her accrued status was unquestionably earned through determination, smarts, and an inherent belief in herself.
There is also this physical reality. In a crowded room of big shots and large egos, Raimondo would not stand out. She is reported to be five-foot-two. At fifty-three she has a style that is energized and youthful. Her manner of presentation — by her own account — is not bombastic. So the impact of what she says comes from its contents and not her swagger.
After her education and years in venture capital, Raimondo ran for and was elected to the position of Rhode Island general treasurer, where she confronted the state’s badly performing public employee pension system — and which meant trimming benefits to recipients until the reorganized investment policies showed a sustainable return. To be an elected Democrat taking on state and local employees guaranteed pushback, and there was.
Once the inevitable controversy and lawsuits were dealt with, Rhode Island’s Retirement Security Act was enacted with bipartisan support and went into effect in June 2015, after she had been elected governor in a three-way race, with 41 percent of the vote.
I first encountered Raimondo in 2018 on Stephen Dubner’s “Freakonomics Radio” program in an interview called “How to Be a Modern Democrat — and Win.” I arranged to visit her in Providence to pitch an idea for a book about the role of a governor as CEO of a state. She was too busy to write it — and the book idea of comparing management of a state and a business is still out there.
Raimondo’s name came up during the 2020 Biden campaign for one administration job or another, which turned out to be secretary of commerce, the position she held for the full four-year term. Here is a succinct summary of her work, which appeared in an Associated Press profile:
“She has been integral to efforts to reshape the U.S. economy. She managed infrastructure money to eventually connect everyone to the internet, approved the funding of new factories and research sites for advanced computer chips and set up the government’s ground rules for developing artificial intelligence.”
And in an age when the potential for criticism is charged by polarized politics and free-for-all social media, nearly as I can attest, Raimondo emerged with a reputation for effectiveness — and personally unscathed.
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Asking someone to explain themselves can be an invitation to earnestness. And I heard expressions of “faith,” “self-discipline,” the ability to “focus, obsessively” on the task at hand. But how, I wanted to know, did she handle the frustrations of political obstacles when policies she supported were being stalled or even dismantled?
That’s when I got a sense of her feisty determination. “When I hear people say, ‘You know I agree with you,’ but I need to ….”
“What kind of coward are you?” is Raimondo’s standard riposte.
Because Raimondo’s commitment has always been focused on the issue at hand and not her personal glory, she was able to maintain composure with opponents who would have been glad to make her angry. Whatever bureaucratic cut and thrust there doubtless has been, the Department of Commerce has been the source of none of the leaks that in Washington are the preferred means of revenge or retaliation (or at least none that my assiduous search online could find).
Another characteristic that Raimondo cited is personal organization. This approach was most notably framed in a now-famous 2014 commencement speech at the University of Texas by Admiral William McRaven that became known by its title and later a major bestselling book called Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe the World.
McRaven’s exhortation was that the way you start your day — by making your bed rather than leaving it in disarray — is a metaphor for fulfilling a broader plan.
When I asked Raimondo if she was familiar with McRaven’s concept, I didn’t have to explain.
“One hundred percent,” she replied.
I recently read that Raimondo, who married Andrew Moffit in 2001 and has two children, intended to stay in Washington until June, when her son will finish high school. To my question about parenting as a leadership tool, she deflected. Raimondo does not promote her family as a political asset.
Combining public visibility with personal privacy is another aspect of being effective in Raimondo’s case. She has certainly gotten her share of recognition as a powerful woman — in the Time Magazine 100, for instance. But I’m guessing that except in Rhode Island and Democratic Party circles she is not famous.
I can’t say I know Gina Raimondo beyond our encounters in Providence or by phone — but from a distance and after making my rounds of reporting, she certainly has been getting it done.
Sam Feist is the newly appointed CEO of C-SPAN , recruited from CNN, where he was the Washington bureau chief. His career in public affairs programming began, he says, when as a ninth grader in Ridgefield, Connecticut, he organized a candidate debate for the town’s first selectman on behalf of the League of Women Voters.
C-SPAN leadership is a natural career pinnacle.
In a conversation as he was settling in, we focused on three issues that will shape the future for an enterprise that for forty-five years has been supported by cable companies. C-SPAN now consists of three television networks, a radio channel, and a website that maintains a vast archive of material — all available for free.
(1) Funding and Distribution. How to enhance the resources and reach of C-SPAN. The cable companies have provided almost 100 percent of C-SPAN’s revenues, and with the rise of competing streaming services, the viewership available to C-SPAN through cable has been reduced by as much as 40 percent.
(2) Programming. How to make best use of the 24/7 broadcast schedule — with live programming, events, documentaries, and interviews developed and hosted by C-SPAN staff. Full coverage of the Senate and the House of Representatives is, of course, the primary content when they are in session and was the initial reason for C-SPAN’s creation in 1979.
(3) Content Moderation. All callers to C-SPAN are screened before they get on the air. Now that Facebook, X, et al., have decided that anything goes when it comes to people’s comments, what will happen to C-SPAN’s discourse? Can it maintain logic, common sense, and accuracy?
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“Cord cutting from traditional cable and satellite companies has had an enormous impact on our distribution,” Feist says, “particularly as so many cable customers switch to YouTube TV, Fubo TV and Hulu, which don’t currently carry C-SPAN.”
From the outset, the cable industry has seen a benefit to broadcasting the sessions of Congress, where members can reach constituents directly — and without commentary, a political plus for them.
The owners of what are known in technical lingo as vMVPDs — “virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors” — like You Tube TV, Fubo TV and Hulu are all purely profit-focused. C-SPAN, by contrast, is considered a public service and not a financial asset.
So, why bother to carry it? the owners ask.
FAST channels — “Free Ad-Supported Television” — are the latest approach to streaming. From the earliest days of broadcast, viewers got whatever was on air without paying for it, and endured advertising in return. This has now become accepted practice in streaming as well. Today’s streaming behemoths like Netflix and Apple TV+ have vast numbers of paying subscribers and now seek growth by offering lower monthly fees to those viewers willing to watch ads in the middle of their programs.
If C-SPAN were to create a FAST of its own, would it for the first time in its history use advertising to pay for it?
C-SPAN’s challenge — and Feist’s immediate objective — is to persuade vMVPDs and FASTs to include C-SPAN in their packages to subscribers. There are two ways to do this: Start selling advertising would be the most dramatic change, or lobby members of Congress to take action, reminding them that C-SPAN covers what they do.
Politicians are always attuned to their self-interest, and Feist believes they may advocate for all streaming platforms to include C-SPAN. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) are the first members of Congress to publicly make that case.
Feist is also exploring ways to add revenue in the manner of other nonprofit media outlets: subscriptions, donations, paid events, and philanthropic grants. He says that C-SPAN will not ask for government funding, as NPR and PBS still do — and which makes those networks subject to political pressure.
To repeat: C-SPAN is and never will be a government enterprise, but its purpose is conveyed in this motto: “Democracy Unfiltered.”
So, what all these acronyms and money issues mean for C-SPAN is this: The “good old days” of a single funding and distribution source (the cable industry) has to be reinvented for the digital era.
Now.
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On the question of programming — what brings viewers to C-SPAN’s networks — Feist wants to emphasize live programs: news as it is being made. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News do that, surrounded by commentators describing what is happening and telling viewers what they should think.
C-SPAN can let viewers decide for themselves. But that means being present at those events, which in turn requires staff and cameras — back to funding.
My greatest personal interest is the programming that C-SPAN itself creates. For years, Booknotes, Brian Lamb’s Sunday evening interviews with authors, was C-SPAN’s most popular show. (C-SPAN does not collect audience ratings. But when I published books based on those conversations, they were national bestsellers.)
Lamb was insistent that he was not the “star” of Booknotes, but he definitely was, for his distinctive style of preparation and questioning. Like him, NPR and PBS hosts do not come draped in the glamour and paychecks of commercial newscasters. Their fans are drawn to the style they project — less bombastic, less opinionated, curious rather than pontifical.
Identifying talent is an art. There are many people with the right talent in the broader media world for C-SPAN to hire. Sam Feist and his colleagues need to look for them.
As a publisher, I have watched with interest and admiration the weekend programming of “Book TV,” two days during which nonfiction books are featured at events or interviews. The audience for book programming is significant; stores like Politics and Prose in Washington draw good-size audiences for their events and then stream most of them, which can attract thousands of views.
Feist intends to help venues improve their setting for events (lights and sound quality, for example). Making the authors and locations partners in production would enhance the experience for all concerned.
C-SPAN’s documentary series on presidents, first ladies, and other historical figures and periods have been very good. Again, the goal is programming that is absorbing, without becoming so expensive that it is out of reach.
So, this is the programming objective: Do more with what is already there. The memorable line from the film Field of Dreams applies: “If you build it, they will come.”
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How the viewer call-ins will evolve — the open lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are a unique feature of C-SPAN’s programs — in a world of social media free-for-all remains to be seen. In live programming, fact-checking isn’t feasible. When a caller descends into rants, conspiracies, or insults, the hosts have always had the prerogative to end the call.
Free speech and censorship are especially sensitive topics in this era. Maintaining standards is another of C-SPAN’s goals in our time of media mayhem.
When Sam Feist learned that C-SPAN was looking for a new CEO, he knew immediately that he wanted the job. Predictably there were those in the commercial media who said that he would be consigned to a niche.
Maybe, but what a classy niche to be in.
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Two of the Platform Books books previously available in hardcover have now added paperbacks available by order wherever books are sold. They are: An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen (978-1735996875) and Would You Believe…The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? (978-1735996882).
The restored Trump era is fully underway. It will be one for the ages but it will end because everything eventually has to be over one way or another.
Meantime, we have to peer beyond despair and begin working on the future. When Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston he was a forty-two-year-old state senator from Illinois. Four years later he was elected President of the United States.
Campaigning in all fifty states for the 2026 midterms will begin almost immediately. There will be 435 House elections, and one-third of the Senate will be running as well. Democrats will choose candidates for thirty-six gubernatorial contests and positions down the ballot for legislatures and indispensable local services like schools and safety. There will, of course, be candidates carrying the MAGA banner, which is what the Grand Old Party has become.
The 2028 presidential campaign will begin as soon as the mid-terms are over. Trump will almost certainly try to get a third term despite the Constitution’s explicit prohibition in the Twenty-second amendment. We’ve learned never to underestimate Trump’s defiance of the norms.
So, everyone who wants there to be a future after this era should be focused on who will carry to victory a revived Democratic party against MAGA and what remains of the Republicans with any residue of independence.
It can only happen if we get started now, right now.
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Coming Tuesday: Media Mayhem. And Then There is… C-SPAN. Yes, C-SPAN
Across the spectrum of expertise and politics, the consensus is that China is the major challenger to the United States for global supremacy in the twenty-first century. Agreed.
But having reported from the Soviet Union decades ago and edited the books of so many Russian leaders and dissidents, and Western journalists and public figures who have written about Russia and China, I can make a case that in the coming years, China will be the major adversary, and Russia is already the enemy.
China is vast, immensely powerful, and ambitious. It wants Taiwan. It is intent on dominating global science, commerce, and manufacturing.
By most measures (other than land mass), Russia is a much smaller threat, heavily dependent on extraction for its economic stability. But it has nuclear weapons that could destroy the world and in Vladimir Putin a dictator unrestrained by any internal pressures and prepared to murder anyone who crosses him.
He blasted the renegade militia leader Yevgeny Prigozhin out of the sky. He eliminated the opposition hero Alexei Navalny in prison, after failing to poison him to death. He invaded Ukraine, determined to conquer the country, whatever it takes.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, completed the takeover of Hong Kong, a center of international finance and pragmatic values, and did so without force, repressing liberties and undermining but not destroying its economic base. As of August 2024, China holds 9.11 percent of U.S. debt, second only to Japan as a creditor nation.
At price-conscious U.S. retailers, a tariff on goods “Made in China” would make bargain shopping much harder. The notion of a national boycott of Chinese food is, well, remote.
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To fully explore the reasons the U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia relationships in 2025 represent such different threats to peace and security, exceeds the range of this format. But here are some thoughts.
The rise of China since the 197Os has been organic but also relentless. A country so long penurious and divided is unified and has created an economy that enabled its people to live in ways their ancestors could not have imagined.
The Soviet Union imploded in 1991 because of the collapse of what was an economy largely dependent on barter and an empire that was held together by bonds that turned out to be tenuous.
When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, the breakthrough was celebrated in the United States by, among other phenomena, a storewide display of Chinese culture at Bloomingdale’s in New York and awestruck stories by reporters excited to glimpse the Great Wall. At the same time, the U.S. war in Vietnam, waged in part to forestall a Chinese takeover, persisted.
In the 1970s, during the era of U.S. Soviet détente and arms control negotiations, the only American-based consumer product available in the Soviet Union was Pepsi-Cola. The continuation of Most Favored Nation status was dependent on how many Jews the Soviets allowed to emigrate, a U.S. congressional requirement.
During the Cold War, the “Russia” that Americans generally referred to was actually fifteen separate republics, with hundreds of nationalities. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Kremlin ruled an empire like that of the Ottomans or the Romans, destined to fall apart — in what turned out to be less than seventy-five years.
Communist China was a scary place. It sent troops into Korea in the early 1950s, turning the tide of the war there. It was menacing for years after, even as periodic upheavals like the Cultural Revolution overwhelmed its intentions to directly intervene outside its borders. The U.S. warily opened the door to China with Nixon’s trip to Beijing in 1972 and Jimmy Carter’s establishment of full diplomatic relations in 1979. By 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army massacred democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, the U.S soon afterward sent envoys to Beijing to restore ties that were considered essential.
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Vladimir Putin has returned Russia to lawlessness — not at the scale of the Stalin years but recognizable in evil intent. He holds a profound grudge about the humiliations of the post-Soviet era. A country that turned back Napoleon and Hitler sees NATO as a comparable threat and vulnerable to Russian ferocity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union faced off with nuclear buildups. The Soviets stepped back from confrontations in Berlin and Cuba. Today, the endgame in Ukraine remains unknown.
Would Putin really do whatever it takes to restore Russian glory? He has threatened to use nuclear force. Who is in a position to stop him?
For China, Taiwan is the potential flashpoint for a superpower conflict, as Berlin once was. If Xi Jinping chooses a violent takeover of the island, how can the West respond?
For now, when it comes to competition and potential confrontation, China is unquestionably a formidable adversary. But the country does have considerable and distracting economic and social stresses. Xi is a dictator, but he also constrained by a population expecting the continuation of better living standards in addition to accretion of international power.
By contrast, Putin answers to no one. From nearly all accounts the Russia people are accepting of their fate. His enmity towards the West, and the United States in particular, is a toxic brew of rage and contempt. Russia may be weaker than it wants the world to believe, but it is no less dangerous, possibly even more so.
That meets any definition of enemy.
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After months of posting weekly pieces — the eighteen parts of LBJ-McNamara -The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail and in the momentum of the election season, this Substack will return to a bi-weekly schedule. The challenge is to find ways to frame issues, ideas and stories that go beyond opinion (or what I consider, even when I do it, pontification) to add something to what is already known. When circumstances and instinct demand a piece off-schedule, I will do them.
So do read on. Subscriptions are free, which is what most people choose. If you go for the paid option, two NGOs will benefit: The Barth Syndrome Foundation and CIVIC –The Center for Civilians in Conflict.
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Cher: The Memoir, Part One was a major bestseller this holiday season. Her 1965 cover of Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” was her first solo hit.
A Complete Unknown, the new movie starring Timothée Chalamet about Dylan’s ascent, is playing well in theaters. In northern California, I can attest, they are sold out.
Dylan’s folk-rock rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was considered a turning point in the way music would be heard from then on, because he used electric amplification.
1965. That was sixty years ago!
Cher is seventy-eight years old. Bob Dylan is eighty-three.
And while we’re at it. Mick Jagger is eighty-one. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” was recorded in 1966 and has been downloaded on Spotify over one billion times, according to its own count.
Paul McCartney is eighty-two. His “Got Back” global tour ended last month in London with a guest appearance by Ringo Starr and total ticket sales estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars. The Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road, was recorded in 1969.
Barbra Streisand is also eighty-two. Her nearly one-thousand-page memoir, My Name Is Barbra, was an Amazon bestseller from the time pre-orders started rolling in, ten months before it was published. Streisand had a number-one album in every decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, and her most recent album, 2022’s Live at the Bon Soir, was recorded in 1962 but not released for sixty years.
What are their genres? Rock, pop, standards, jazz, folk, country, R&B? (Rap not so much.)
How about classical? Not in the way of Beethoven, Mozart, or Chopin. But recording and performing at this level for so long is a tribute to endurance and quality, with an open timeline for the future.
Yes, but their Baby Boomer fans will die out, and in our multicultural world, they are all white.
Oh wait. Cher is the youngest. Dylan, Jagger, and the others are actually older than the Boomers, whose cohort — including Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Madonna, James Taylor, Bono and Stevie Wonder, standing on the revered shoulders of Berry Gordy’s Motown, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, B. B. King, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley — are all, based on tens of millions of downloads, still superstars.
Their works have transited the eras of radio and television play, singles, LPs, cassettes, CDs, videos, and stadium concerts.
So what, aside from talent, energy, and ambition, accounts for longevity in popular (because that’s what it is) music?
Here is where I veer away from data to opinion. Each of these definable classics has a distinctive persona:
Cher has a particularly notable style in dress, sass, and business instincts. Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift are adorned in finery that evoke Cher’s choices. And whatever her managers may have told her to do, Cher has devised strategies that keep her front and center, feminist and in charge.
Dylan’s presence is especially interesting to me. Critical reviews of A Complete Unknown complain that the mystery of Bob Dylan is not revealed. That is exactly the point. Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota, devised his persona as a form of tribute to Woody Guthrie and his ilk. The album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , showing him on a Greenwich Village street in1963 with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, set standards for being young and cool that are immutable.
In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He accepted it months later in a private ceremony, having had someone else read his speech at the official ceremony.
In 1967, Mick Jagger was convicted in a British court of possession of four amphetamine tablets and sentenced to three months in prison, later overturned. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll were Rolling Stones signatures. And yet Jagger still defiantly has the bounce and moves of times long past. Whatever Mick Jagger has imbibed over the years, he has taken it in apparent stride.
Of the Beatles, Paul McCartney was the cute one and shared with John Lennon a mastery of song writing. In his group and solo incarnations since the Beatles split up he has never lost the soulful aura of his song “Yesterday,” composed in 1965, which has been covered more than two thousand times but never matched.
When Barbara Streisand dropped the second “a” in her name as a teenager in Brooklyn to become Barbra, she sent a signal of formidable, fierce identity. She has excelled in every way since — tenacious to an extent that exhausted many around her, but not herself. Streisand’s voice was naturally amazing, and it turned out she could act and direct with the same inherent drive.
What makes success on a scale of these eightysomethings possible? You may have read that age has been a subject of political consideration in recent years. The luck of genetic makeup is certainly a factor. A stoutness of heart and mind is essential. As is self-discipline. The sixties greats Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison all died at age twenty-seven in 1970 and 1971, succumbing to the temptations of fame and fortune.
Genius in some measure must be embedded from infancy. Being able to use it for so long and so well, as Cher, Dylan, Jagger, McCartney, and Streisand have done, is inspiring.
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The Simon & Schuster audio of “LBJ and McNamara The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail” including the bonus recordings of editorial sessions with McNamara is available everywhere today and on Sunday, Jan 12 at 5 p.m. Evan Osnos and I will be in conversation about the book at Politics and Prose 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington D.C.
Brian Lamb is the founder of C-SPAN and for many years host of the Sunday night broadcast Booknotes, in depth interviews with non-fiction writers. Lamb now hosts a weekly podcast called Booknotes+. In all, by his informal count Lamb has given “thousands” of authors the gift of an hour of conversation with a reader and questioner of remarkable skills.
We are good friends, but on the subject of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, Brian has strong personal views having served in the Navy during the Vietnam era which gave the session a challenging edge, unusual for a Lamb interrogation. Here is our interview:
Here’s the link:
