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Erik Spanberg
The Christian Science Monitor, May 25, 2017
“The man who built his support on community outreach and taking back the country from well-heeled corporate interests would, Garrow writes, in the span of a few years go from boasting that 90% of his donations were for $100 or less to beaming alongside Beyoncé and Jay Z at a $40,000-per-person fund-raiser featuring $800 bottles of Champagne.”
In David Garrow’s acknowledgments at the end of Rising Star, his mammoth biography of the 44th US president, he writes, “Barack Obama devoted dozens of hours to reading the first ten chapters of this manuscript and his understandable remaining disagreements – some strong indeed – with multiple characterizations and interpretations contained herein do not lessen my deep thankfulness for his appreciation of the scholarly seriousness with which I have pursued this project and for what became eight full hours of always-intense ‘off-the-record’ conversations.”
For Mr. Obama, known to be thin-skinned and prickly in the face of criticism, those disagreements and intense conversations will likely multiply once he has a chance to read the 50-page epilogue following the 10 chapters comprising the president’s life story and improbable journey to the White House. In those 50 pages, Garrow synthesizes his balanced and extensive research and interviews into a sharply critical and unsparing assessment of the Obama presidency.
Garrow nods to Mr. Obama’s “crucible of self-creation” and his “ironclad will” while concluding the resulting “vessel was hollow at its core.” He delineates the president’s worst impulses, from confiding in and trusting a tiny coterie of aides to abandoning any attempts at bipartisanship. Citing the conclusions of Washington operator Bob Gates, whose Pentagon leadership spanned parts of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, Garrow points to a foreign policy so dominated by a determination to avoid costly quagmires that it devolved into nothingness.
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