My Response to the New York Times’ Review of My Book “Cry Havoc”

The following is a revised version of a letter I sent to Marc Lacey of The New York Times on September 4, 2020, in response to his review of my book Cry Havoc: Charlottesville and American Democracy under Siege.

Mr. Lacey:

I hope this finds you doing well.

It’s been interesting over the last couple of days taking in reaction from my colleagues, and measuring my own reaction, to your review of my book Cry Havoc titled “Tested by Tragedy, Two Politicians Review Their Records — Mistakes Included.” I write in the book about how the wisest path for political leaders is usually to pull their punches, not to respond to criticism.

However, having been a book reviewer in the past (I reviewed books for a couple of years for the Daily Beast), and with my parents both journalists, I felt a need to send a response to you. At the very least, I hope this is helpful as you go about future reviews, and as you and your paper consider the actions of similar public officials in similar situations.

I will begin by saying that I appreciated the notes of praise and appreciation in the review, that Cry Havoc was “worthy” and “reflective,” and that you took time to recount the First Amendment difficulties.

But, in my view, there were problems in the elements of the review regarding my performance in office and my political future. I would submit to you the following.

Again in my view, the best book reviews approach the book at hand as a book. Even if it’s highly critical, a book review can really shed light if it approaches the work in question on its own terms.

But your review misconstrued the book. The book is not principally a “memoir” at all. It is a first-person account with an emphasis on explaining and interpreting the events in Charlottesville as a gory case study for governance under siege and the broader prospects for achieving democratic resilience in a turbulent time. For instance, I write that Charlottesville is a “case study for a surprising truth about how growth in a healthy democracy occurs — that it’s agonistic (p. 12)”.

Those parts of the book are signaled in the subtitle — “Charlottesville and American Democracy under Siege” — and they are woven throughout, including in the final chapter surveying efforts around the country to combat extremism.

Yet this entire thrust of the book not only doesn’t appear in the review; it isn’t acknowledged. As a colleague wrote me about the review, “This might be considered a job review rather than a book review!”

Why was it necessary, relevant, or important to opine on my job performance — and that of Senator Murphy (whose book I have not read) — in a review of a book?

That leads me to a related question. Regarding your comments that my performance was “clumsy” and “ill-prepared,” and that readers should not expect to see me on a ballot “anytime soon,” it is impossible to tell whether those observations are offered from within the structure and perspective of the book (after all, the facts that provide the basis for those conclusions are offered up by me, the author, in the book itself), or whether those are your own conclusions.

The confusion goes deep into the way in which evidence is presented. For example, when you write that the book is a “defense of sorts against the criticism that he and others in the city mishandled the crisis” and note that, “An independent investigation into what went wrong on the streets of Charlottesville found some of Signer’s actions lacking,” you do not acknowledge that this very independent investigation is featured by me in the book (pp. 284–288).

I included these critiques for the reason I stated on p. 11: that “those hidden stories of ‘wrestling in the gray’… is “what real leadership is, and we need to understand it better.”

Candid recountings of the difficulty of handling havoc at the local level are, I contend in the book, essential today, as leaders and communities figure out how to chart a path through this havoc.

I wanted to share with you an anecdote that perhaps will illuminate why I feel the review is so problematic along these lines. I was on a call three weeks ago with two dozen other current and former mayors. While the call was confidential, I can say that many other elected officials at the local level are experiencing versions of what I did in Charlottesville. Intensifying clashes among activists on the left and right, attacks on their own purported failures in office on matters including policing and race relations, protester stake-outs at their personal residences. Many expressed frustration at the ease of simplified attack, at the ignoring of accomplishments, and at the simplification of the challenges they face in the media. Several of the other officials questioned why anyone would go into local office at all given this climate. It was chilling.

My broader contention in the book is that democratic resilience is achievable, but that it requires constant, proactive innovation from within democratic norms and institutions, and from leaders, despite and against these dangerous home-grown threats. Examples include the lawsuit we filed with Georgetown University that employed a 200 year-old provision in Virginia’s constitution to prevent both right- and left-wing militias from invading the city again (pp. 270–273, not mentioned in the review).

Yet the review would almost obviate all of this. It would say to a leader: if you had a rough time, if you confessed to, could be seen as, or even were (and let’s not distinguish between those nuances) “clumsy” or “ill-prepared” on tough issues — then not only should you be out of office, but you should not be on a ballot.

The “job review” bias of the review perhaps explains its stark elisions. On the discussion of my position on the Lee statue — the review completely ignores the book’s recounting of the divisions within Charlottesville’s Black community on the issue (p. 63, pp. 76–77), or the recommendations of the majority-minority Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces to keep the statues in the city (pp. 85–86). Instead, my choices are framed simply as “middle-ground” failures of leadership rather than as anything potentially more.

The review also elides the learnings in the book about the city manager form of government in Charlottesville (pp. 26–27, among others), which 50% of American cities share, where power and authority is split and divided, without many citizens knowing it.

This is unfortunate because so many cities right now under siege (Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Kalamazoo) face similarly divided governments, where successful leadership through civic turmoil requires complicated dances.

And needless to say, while the review states that my term as mayor “unceremoniously ended,” it neglects to mention that I in fact completed my full term in office as Mayor, that I stayed on the City Council for two years more (completing my full elected term), and that I helped to nominate my successor, who, as you note, was a critic of mine.

In the process of ignoring these components of the book, the review ends up well-nigh sanctioning the “cancellation” of a public figure.

As you report on other embattled figures fighting their way through murky situations where there are no clear answers, I would encourage you and the Times to consider how much good work there is on the opposite front — examining the value of challenge, difficulty, even failure — whether in the start-up world and the literature around “failing forward” in entrepreneurship, or in political biographies and histories that examine the full range of a leader’s contributions and failings as part of the broader trajectory of growth, of potential. I think of John Hope Franklin’s The Emancipation Proclamation about Lincoln’s compromises, Ron Chernow’s Grant, or James MacGregor Burns’ Leadership.

I would ask you, sir — as you look at me in the book, or at other mayors struggling to contain civic conflict in places including Richmond, Kenosha, Kalamazoo, Portland, Berkeley — what would you have done in my shoes? In theirs? How could any of us have been better “prepared”?

That is the rub right now, especially as the civic unrest we saw in Charlottesville is metastasizing across the country. As I recount in the book, I have spent the last years trying to help others answer that question. When I talk with other local leaders about lessons from Charlottesville, the first question I begin with is: what form of government do you have? Who’s in charge of the police? Of communications? Minneapolis, for instance, has a “weak mayor” form of government, too — except there, the mayor is in charge of the police. Then we talk about things like security plans that can separate protesters and counter-protesters, permitting and litigation strategies that can more successfully highlight public safety over free speech.

I recently joined with the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown to release a toolkit of measures cities can employ to better balance public safety and speech, including through very specific measures like time, place, and manner restrictions on permitting, and the design of security plans, and similar anti-militia lawsuits to the one that succeeded in Charlottesville (you can see more here if you are interested).

Those are the critical nuances where both the problems and the answers will be found. But it’s all thrown out the window if we see, as the review implicitly states, political success as the sole determinant of actual success.

I’ve developed a thick skin, and many others have much thicker skins, and journalists certainly have every right to come to harsh judgments on leaders’ actions.

But to shift the lens a bit: Were I another politician reading this review thinking about writing about my experiences, I might just take away the following: don’t write an honest book. Don’t go into detail. Write a cinematic, Hollywood-style book, where you’re the hero and others are villains. Conceal or manipulate the actual facts. If there were mistakes or awful parts, bluster your way through them. And, when The New York Times writes a review about you opining on your performance, just ignore it. Because your aim is political, anyway.

I didn’t want to write that book. That’s why I wrote this book, the warts-and-all version. It’s why I was so pained by some aspects of your review, and it’s why, I suppose, I am sending you this perhaps unguarded letter for your consideration.

I will conclude with a sincere thanks for reading and for reviewing the book, and for reading this letter. At the very least, I hope it is helpful as you and your paper continue your essential work.

Sincerely,

Michael Signer