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The Terror Presidency
by Jack Goldsmith
Review by Ann Brick, Staff
Attorney
This insider's view of the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Counsel reads like a first-rate thriller, full of spell-binding details about how those entrusted with defining the legal limits on torture, domestic surveillance, and the exercise of executive power helped chart the course for the civil liberties disaster that became the war on terror.
Author and Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith served as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 to June 2004. In those short nine months, he played a key role in attempting to rein in the excesses of John Yoo and others who were providing legal cover for the Bush Administration's excesses. Goldsmith describes what he found and what he did about it, including withdrawing the infamous Yoo torture memos—a move that ultimately cost Goldsmith his job.
The Terror Presidency offers a lesson in what happens when expediency and ideology triumph over the obligation to provide sound legal advice.
Three things make this book well worth reading now, and in the
future. First, Goldsmith is a conservative who believes in a strong
executive – a view that animated many in President Bush’s inner circle,
particularly Cheney and Addington. His lucid explanation of the basis for
that view, as well as his ability to convey the sense of urgency and fear of
another terrorist attack that pervaded the executive branch, provides the
necessary backdrop for understanding much of what went on during the Bush years.
Second, the book provides a fascinating study of executive power by
comparing three presidencies. Lincoln and Roosevelt managed to make
Congress an ally in expanding their power; the Bush Administration treated the
legislative branch as an inconvenient nuisance.
Finally, Goldsmith is a gifted story-teller, able to evoke the drama and intrigue surrounding attempts to bring the administration to heel. He paints a vivid picture in which life imitates art, making this a book you won't want to put down.
Richard Yates would never have considered himself a feminist. However, his 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is an astute indictment of strict gender roles, particularly the insistence that women find total contentment in child rearing.
This insightful critique of American society reminds us that nostalgia for the 1950s is seriously misguided. Placing his characters on the ironically named "Revolutionary Road," located in a spirit-crushing suburb, Yates laments the decline of a country founded on revolutionary zeal to become a society that celebrates conformity.
Neglected for decades, Revolutionary Road is enjoying a well deserved renaissance. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award in 1962—an extraordinary year for American fiction—along with Joseph Heller's Catch-22. (Both would lose to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.) But many readers found its portrayal of America too bleak and unsparing, especially as the country found new optimism with the election of John Kennedy.
Once again, the mood of the country is hopeful, proud of electing new leaders committed to restoring American ideals. But Revolutionary Road remains a cautionary tale of less tolerant strands in American culture that have never been extinguished. It deserves to be read for its insight into our conflicting desires for conformity and individualism. But equally important, Revolutionary Road should be enjoyed as a wildly funny novel.
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black
Americans from the Civil War to World War II
In Green Cottenham’s Alabama—where the steel industry had developed to provide an arsenal for the war—whites realized that they could find a way around the Thirteenth Amendment and reduce the cost of prisons. Whites set to subjugating blacks by arresting them on minor charges (or no charges at all) and selling them to the nascent industries that agreed to pay their fines in return for hard labor.
One of the mines was described by the New York Times in 1882: "Black prisoners were packed into a single cramped cabin like slaves on the Atlantic passage." In windowless, vermin-ridden bunks, laborers were served cold food from unwashed coal buckets. Disease was rampant. Many never saw the light of day, and wore iron shackles day and night. Punishment for not reaching the day’s quota included whipping, being hung from hooks and water torture.
Women who pleaded for release of their husbands were raped and often arrested themselves. Escapees were hunted down, harshly punished or killed.
Blackmon thinks it is no
coincidence that the largest expansion of Southern industry occurred in 1892,
the year of the greatest numbers of lynchings.
Sifting through
census records, court transcripts and company ledgers, Blackmon brings this
gruesome, hidden history to light. As a fan of history, I'm particularly
impressed by three aspects of Blackmon's research.
First, as
Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Blackmon brings an intimate
knowledge of the South and evolution of southern politics since the antebellum
period, including the intertwined relations of large plantation owners, local
(and eventually national) politicians and new industrialists.
Second, he doggedly scrutinizes giant corporations and their
subsidiaries to uncover their exploitation and brutalization of black
workers. Who but a Wall Street Journal reporter could explain the
intricate relation between steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, the Tennessee Coal,
Steel and Railroad Company, local sheriffs who provided the mines with slave
labor, and the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessey v. Ferguson? Blackmon
characterizes the latter as an "extraordinary turning point in the evolution of
a nation."
Finally, Blackmon makes this difficult, complex past
accessible with his journalist's knack of spinning a narrative around a single
man and letting Green Cottenham, buried in Slope #12 of the Frick coal mine,
lead us through the tangled web of Southern capitalism and the unrelenting,
vicious treatment of African Americans decades after the Civil War was won.
Elaine Elinson is a co-author, with Stan Yogi, of the forthcoming book Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California.
The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization
Review by Gigi Pandian, Graphic Designer & Publication Production Manager
As the child of an immigrant who first set foot in this country when he was 30 years old, I had the promise of the United States instilled in me at an early age. It's something I hope to contribute to in my work at the ACLU, and what drew me to the book The Accidental American, which tells the compelling personal story of one immigrant to convey a broader narrative about U.S. immigration in the post-9/11 world.
In The Accidental American, author Rinku Sen tells the life story of Moroccan immigrant Fekkak Mamdouh, who was working in the World Trade Center in 2001. On September 11, Mamdouh found himself viewed as the enemy rather than part of the community that he felt he had become a part of, and contributed to, in the United States.
Like many before him, Mamdouh came to the United States in search of a better life. Working at Windows on the World, a restaurant in the World Trade Center, he was one of the lucky employees who was not at work when the towers collapsed. In the aftermath, Mamdouh was moved by the positive support of members of the community and shocked by the negative repercussions against him as a Muslim. These reactions led him on the path to becoming an activist with the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) of New York, formed to help an ethnically diverse group of restaurant workers fight for better working conditions, and thus for their rights as members of the American community.
The personal story of Mamdouh, as well as a look at other immigrant restaurant workers involved in ROC, makes for a gripping tale. Going beyond personal anecdotes, Sen spends the middle of the book focusing on the intricacies of political and organizing efforts spearheaded by ROC, and looking at more productive ways to frame the current immigration debate.
The Accidental American is about all of us living in the United States. It isn't only immigrants such as Mamdouh, and my own father, who are 'accidental' Americans. As Sen sums up: "Where we enter this world is an accident of birth; where we are when we leave is equally unpredictable... We are all accidental Americans in some way."
Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise
of the Lesbian Rights Movement
Review by Stan Yogi, Planned Giving Director
In the wake of Proposition 8, reading Marcia Gallo's excellent 2006 book, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement, provides welcome historical context for the current struggle to secure LGBT equality. A professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a former ACLU-NC Field Director, Gallo has done groundbreaking research and analyzed the lesbian rights movement through the development of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first U.S. organization for lesbians.
Formed in 1955 as a social group by eight San Francisco lesbians, DOB quickly took on an activist focus under the leadership of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. During the tightly closeted 1950s and early 1960s—when being openly lesbian could result in arrest, job loss, ostracism, and harassment—DOB grew into a national organization that worked for lesbians' self-acceptance, countered negative stereotypes of lesbians through its pioneering magazine The Ladder, and lobbied to decriminalize homosexuality.
Gallo chronicles DOB’s role within the blossoming gay rights movement (in which women encountered sexism) and women’s movement (in which lesbians confronted homophobia). She brings history alive by focusing on the diverse leaders of DOB and their philosophical and personal agreements and disagreements over the group's 23 year life.
Different Daughters is an engaging and valuable history that documents how " out" lesbians paved the way for lesbian feminists of the 1970s and contemporary activists fighting for marriage equality, and did so during a time when being gay was considered criminal and sinful. As one early DOB member recently commented, "I wonder what today’s activists would do if they had to confront what we did back then?"
Review by Cheri Bryant, Development Director
A novel of a time in France when freedom and rights were suspended by war, Suite Français is a riveting story of World War II. Written by a victim of the Holocaust, the novel remained hidden and unpublished for 64 years, coming to light in 2004. An English translation followed in 2006.
Suite Française is a novel in two parts. The first is a darkly humorous
narrative of residents fleeing Paris just before the Nazi occupation. Upper
class refugees can hardly believe the inconveniences they must endure as they
stream from the city with cars piled high with luxuries and comforts. Soon they
learn that war will touch even them, and in unexpected ways.
The second half
of the novel is a pastoral story of survival in close quarters with the German
sometimes have more in common with the Nazis than with their country neighbors,
and surprisingly intimate relationships can be formed through familiarity and
daily interactions. It's all very fascinating and thought-provoking.
Though
the writing is brilliant and the insight into human character impressive, in my
opinion the whole is made poignant by the fate of the author, Irène Némirovsky,
killed at Auschwitz before fully completing the novel. An appendix includes her
notes on the development of the storyline, from which we learn that her ambition
is to write an epic that will provide greater understanding of the suffering,
folly and hardship of war. But having no knowledge of the true horror of the
concentration camps, her chronicle comes across almost as naive, a narrative
about war from a period of relative innocence before the world learned of the
terrible reality of the Holocaust.
Working at the ACLU, I come away reminded yet again of the value of the core principles of our democracy, and of the need to protect individual rights, free speech and transparency of government.
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