BOOKS
Franklin Foer’s book on Joe Biden is anything but shambolic
An insider account that answers many questions about this White House, but leaves some questions remaining
There’re some people who love the campaign tell-all. Boys on the Bus is terrific; What it Takes is even better. I’m all for a Hunter Thompson classic, but that’s not me. I love the peak inside the White House. I want to know who spilled tea in the Oval Office.
I think that’s because — unlike access to a campaign which often seems bountiful and endless — the White House remains a largely hidden domain. Access is vigorously, and often effectively, protected.
This is why I was so excited to read Franklin Foer’s new book, The Last Politician, on the Biden administration’s first three years in office. Foer had so much access to high-level Biden aides and White House insiders (nearly 300 interviews, most on “deep background” with “staff and friends”!) that each page comes with a new nugget to savor. Jeff Zients — the current White House chief of staff — had a baseball collection as a kid worth $30,000! Who knew!? (in fact, the Washington Post reported on this in 2013)
More importantly, we now know that First Lady Dr. Jill Biden would listen to the recorded interviews of possible secretaries of education. She didn’t like many, especially those who favored charter schools, but relayed her support for the eventual choice, Miguel Cardona. This is a telling anecdote, not altogether shocking, but confirmatory of the power Dr. Biden holds in the White House, especially in the realm of education.
We also learn that the transition team tasked one staffer, David Kamin, with conducting an oral history of the Recovery Act — the Obama era stimulus bill — in order to prepare a similar proposal for Joe Biden once he took office. A lot is revealed from the book about the relationship between Biden and his former boss that only insiders could share.
There’s a lot gained from this high-level access. Little speculation is necessary when you’re talking to those a half step from the President. They’ve been in the room and can relay what world leaders actually said, not simply second or third-hand observations.
There are, however, some limitations on talking to mainly to the smallest group of insiders. Foer’s characterization of the transition period — an area I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about for a forthcoming book — isn’t wrong, but it is limited.
For example, Foer describes the transfer of power between Trump and Biden as chaotic. He actually uses the word shambolic. He uses that word shambolic several times in the book; it seems to be a favorite of his. He uses it to describe the the “shambolic Trump years” and then again to describe the period after the election as the “most shambolic transition of power in American history.”
I have to be honest: I’ve never used this word, not in writing on in speech, though I hear it all the time when I watch English Premier League broadcasts (worth noting is Foer wrote the awesome book on soccer, How Soccer Explains the World). Several years ago, he described the US national soccer team’s 2010 play as “the most shambolic chapters of our soccer history,” in the New Republic. In 2020, in the Atlantic, “the government’s often shambolic efforts to safeguard the election” and before that in 2018 “The campaign was a shambolic masterpiece of improvisation.”
Perhaps most fittingly for a book focused on the nation’s capital, way back in 2000, Foer lamented the ownership of the then-Washington Redskins (now Commanders): “Thanks to [Snyder’s] management, the Redskins have squandered considerable talent, played shambolically, and will finish in the center of the mediocre NFC East.” At the start of this season, Foer’s estimation of Washington’s chances aren’t that far off.
Shambolic apparently means chaotic or disorganized. In this sense, Foer is right that the 2020–21 transition was shambolic. It was chaotic for many involved.
However, here is where that access comes back to bite you.
Several times in the book, Foer provides insider accounts of the obstruction of the Trump administration during the transfer of power. In one case, Jeff Zients, a leader of the Biden transition team and currently the White House chief of staff, wants to get a copy of the plan for Operation Warp Speed, the largely successful Trump effort to speed COVID-19 vaccine development.
A Trump official, Rear Admiral Erica Schwartz, stonewalls the team, claiming they’d only receive publicly available information, though Trump apparently required the Biden transition folks to sign non-disclosure agreements (something I hadn’t read about until Foer’s book). In the end — no big surprise at this point — there actually was no plan to share.
I don’t believe the details of that story were well-reported during the transition period, so it depends on pretty high-level access to this anecdote. They are telling details and reveal much about the Trump administration’s efforts on the pandemic.
Foer had the access to learn from these insiders and that access permitted him to conclude: “Ever since the November election, much of the Trump administration acted as if the Biden people were engaged in a hostile takeover of the government. They refused to share the most basic details that would allow the incoming administration to prepare for the monumental tasks in front of it.”
Here’s where the access yields only a partial picture. When I interviewed people on the transition, not high-ranking officials, but volunteers far down the organizational chart, they revealed something different or at least something more nuanced. Far from chaotic, some suggested that in many agencies cooperation with the Trump administration was exactly what they’d hoped for. It was thorough and routine, marked by an openness that is not reflected in Foer’s book.
To be sure, my access wasn’t what Foer had. My lack of access meant I saw parts of the Biden transition process on issues that weren’t nearly as pressing as the government’s response to COVID. This very different vantage point provided me a wider perspective than Foer, and then a different sense of the level of chaos of in 2020.
Another reason why that high-level access can be misleading is it tends to focus attention on certain types of actors to the exclusion of others. True White House insiders are almost always appointees; rarely does a career civil servant rise to the level of insider. When you mainly interview insiders, then, you get the appointee perspective, and during a transfer of power, the incoming group of insiders interact mainly with the outgoing group of insiders, who also are appointees.
This is reflected in Foer’s book as the Biden insiders he interviewed share deeply worrisome interactions with Trump insiders. From that perspective, the obstruction and weak cooperation that Foer reports was real and likely reflected the attitude of many Trump appointees on their way out.
However, much of the transfer of power is not overseen by insiders. Career bureaucrats span administrations and that administrative glue is what keeps the government functioning while a new set of appointees comes into office.
When I interviewed people on the Biden transition team they regularly described career bureaucrats as anything but obstructing the transfer of power. People said career civil servants were “highly cooperative” and they “exceeded my expectations.” Someone else said the careerists “organized quickly” and had a “no time to waste attitude.” Another person said the careerists were “very professional” and a final person said one careerists “did exactly what he was asked to do.”
Far from shambolic, these interactions reflected a Biden transition process that was highly organized and coordinated. From the perspective of those who wouldn’t call themselves insiders and who often worked on secondary or tertiary issues, the transition looks very different than what one gathers from Foer’s book.
This is not to say that Foer’s book and its conclusions are wrong. The lack of cooperation from Trump appointees on several incredibly important issues was unnecessarily disruptive to the smooth transfer of power. It was risky and threatened the stability of the country and its safety. It was shambolic, as Foer rightly notes.
The transfer of power, though, is a major undertaking involving tens of thousands of people, many who have done this before and will do it again. Nearly all of those careerists interacted with Biden transition officials in exactly the way we all would hope for. This is part why the government continued to function after January 6th, the economy recovered, and the pandemic subsided. Insider accounts tend to narrow the scope of government and, in doing so, obscure a fuller picture of what goes on when a new administration comes to power.
Read Foer’s book then, this spring, read mine for a slightly different perspective.
