Memoirs et al

I continue to add memoirs (and correspondence) to the collection I’m developing. The latest to catch my attention is Robert Reich’s Coming Up Short – a memoir of America (2025) which starts by noting that -

The New Left had relegated the depredations and indignities of class—and the need for strong labor unions to lift workers’ wages, protect jobs, provide pensions, and give workers more job security—to the backwater of activism. By the late 1960s, it felt as if all Americans, apart from the very poor and the very rich, were on the way to enjoying middle-class life. To me, the central problem wasn’t inequality but drab conformity, crass materialism, and the hypocrisy of American ideals—as illustrated in the classic 1967 film The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman, playing Benjamin Braddock, a newly minted college graduate, is told that the future is in “plastics” and is seduced by the mother of the girl he loves. The trail-blazing progressive authors of the late 1950s and 1960s whose books I devoured barely mentioned the working class. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society, published in 1958, America had become a society of abundance.

The Feminine Mystique grew out of a fifteenth anniversary reunion survey at Smith College; its message that women should join the workforce was of little relevance to the workingclass women already in it. Silent Spring spurred the environmental movement. Ralph Nader’s 1965 bestseller, Unsafe at Any Speed, gave birth to the consumer movement. Michael Harrington’s 1962 eye-opener, The Other America, exposed American poverty and inspired Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the working class and the labor movement were all but forgotten.

Not even President Johnson’s Great Society aimed to strengthen and expand the rights of workers. Initially, he intended to repeal the part of the Taft-Hartley Act that allowed so-called open shops, but he backed off when corporate lobbyists attacked. America had a civil rights movement, a women’s rights movement, a gay rights movement, a consumer movement, an environmental movement, a poor people’s campaign, and an anti–Vietnam War movement, but no movement to lift the living standards of the working class.

Reich superbly captures here the mood in not only in the US but in the UK – where I well remember my own shameful neglect of the power of the trade unions. He continues -

Democratic presidents took organized labor for granted if they thought about unions at all. When Jimmy Carter as president had to choose between spending his political capital on a bill to strengthen labor unions or a treaty to hand over control of the Panama Canal to Panama, he chose the treaty and the labor bill died. Bill Clinton didn’t push for labor law reform in his first two years as president when Democrats held a majority in both houses of Congress, nor did Barack Obama in his first two years, when Democrats also had a congressional majority. In 2021 and 2022, when Democrats again narrowly controlled Congress, President Joe Biden did not fight to make it easier for workers to form unions, although, to his credit, he did appoint a pro-union National Labor Relations Board and he walked a union picket line.

In the twenty-first century, millions of American workers—most of them with no college education and no union to support them—lacked a political home.

Without the alternative of economic populism, Americans were more susceptible to right-wing cultural populism. Yet in a world populated by people like Trump, we could not trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. (Here again, much of the public believes America is already at this point.) We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service.

Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims, as, in part, it has. We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications.

We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not feed us tainted food, lawyers not to hoodwink us. Professional ethics would be meaningless.

Diaries, Letters and Memoirs contains the up-to-date listings – all 64 pages

Other selected additions

A Little Yes and a Big No George Grosz (1946) The German/US artist famous for his satirical 

paintings of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s
Persons and Places – fragments of autobiography George Santayana (1953)
Open Secret – the autobiography of the former head of MI5 Sheila Rimington (2001)
A Lie about my Father John Burnside (2006) the Scottish poet
Back from the Brink – 1000 days at number 11 Alistair Darling (2011) ex-Chancellor for the 

Exchequer in Gordon Brown’s government 
Kurt Vonnegut – Letters ed Wakefield (2012) The US writer who survived Dresden
Building – letters 1960-75 Isaiah Berlin (2016) Berlin was the famous UK philosopher
More Affirming 1975-79 - letters Isaiah Berlin (2016)
More Explaining 1982-96 - letters Isaiah Berlin (2019)
The Room where it Happened – a white house memoir John Bolton (2020) Trump’s Sec 

of State who has become his greatest critic

Because, however, the axis of adults had served Trump so poorly, he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the huge federal government. The axis of adults is not entirely responsible for this mind-set. Trump is Trump. I came to understand that he believed he could run the Executive Branch and establish national-security policies on instinct, relying on personal relationships with foreign leaders, and with made-for-television showmanship always top of mind. Now, instinct, personal relations, and showmanship are elements of any President’s repertoire. But they are not all of it, by a long stretch. Analysis, planning, intellectual discipline and rigor, evaluation of results, course corrections, and the like are the blocking and tackling of presidential decision-making, the unglamorous side of the job. Appearance takes you only so far.

More Enlightening 1946-60 letters Isaiah Berlin (2024)
More Flourishing 1928-46 letters Isaiah Berlin (2025)