Donald Trump had lots of admiring things to say about Xi Jinping after their recent summit meeting in Beijing. Xi was much less effusive about his visitor. Trump had barely returned to the U.S. when Xi welcomed Vladimir Putin and extolled China’s closeness and friendship with Russia. As the host, Xi had decisively reached primus inter pares among global autocrats.

What is the meaning of these summits?

Let’s look back on the superpower summits between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, the Cold War years. Global tensions were great, especially over the status of Berlin, divided by a wall and considered the potential trigger for a nuclear confrontation. In time Berlin receded as a threat, but arms control remained the main focus of negotiations, with human rights a continuing issue for the U.S. side.

Never much discussed at these summits was trade or business. The fact is, there was barely any to consider: some grain sales, a Pepsi-Cola franchise, and Most Favored Nation status for the Soviets, which was predicated on the level of Jewish emigration.

Trump’s state visit to China in May, already a fading memory in our maelstrom of events, was mostly about business — or, more pointedly, about money. Tech moguls accompanied the president to Beijing. Whatever deals were agreed matter little in the great scheme of things, in which Trump and Xi parried over tariffs, chips, and rare earth materials, in search of advantage.

The United States, Russia, and increasingly China are fully armed with weapons that can demolish the globe in minutes. The consensus seems to be that the seemingly intractable wars in Ukraine and the Middle East can be essentially overlooked because it turns out that Xi, Putin, and Trump can’t figure out how or whether to resolve them.

So they default to other issues, rather than consider the possible annihilation of the human race.

In the 1970s, the U.S. and the Soviets achieved what was called détente, which meant that the depredations of the superpowers — the war in Vietnam and Soviet forays of various kinds around the world — could be tolerated. China was not competitive yet, and Washington and Moscow were content to let Beijing evolve in its own way, without interference of any consequential kind.

Now China is genuinely powerful. Russia is diminished in most respects but all the more dangerous because of Putin’s messianic aggression and those nuclear weapons he has, no longer being monitored by treaties.

There is also the matter of Donald Trump’s peculiar attitude toward Putin and Xi. He wants to be accepted in their realms of power, but the real dictators seem to doubt he will ever succeed. The result is Trump’s pirouettes, his challenges and flattery, and his threats and then backing down, which actually have little lasting impact on the great subjects of the day: technology, economic competition, and modern versions of war, especially in cyberspace.

*********************

There was one significant development in Trump’s sojourn to China. In his confusing, contradictory, and ignorant way, he exacerbated the most contentious U.S.-China issue: the future of Taiwan.

Berlin was the potential flashpoint of the Cold War. Had the Soviets moved to take over West Berlin, conflagration would have definitely resulted. This did not happen because strategic and diplomatic decisions by successive leaders, on both sides, gradually reduced the likelihood.

When I visited Taiwan in 2023, my conclusion was that the issue was simmering but would not explode because of the clarity of the U.S. position in defense of the island — a laboriously devised message of support for Taiwan and signals to China that a takeover attempt would be more trouble for Xi than he needed to have at that time.

A New York Times headline in 2026 summarized the new reality:

“U.S. Support for Taiwan Now a ‘Negotiating Chip’ with Beijing.”

The gist is that Trump was evasive about Taiwan’s outstanding request for $14 billion worth of air defense systems, anti-drone equipment, and missiles critical to the island’s defense.

From his pinnacle of power, Xi has left no doubt how much he wants Taiwan to be reunited with China, sooner rather than later. How would he accomplish this? His record of triumph over Hong Kong — a combination of pressure, patience, and global acquiescence — could be his ultimate means.

But what if he decides that Donald Trump would bob-and-weave at Chinese aggression, as he has done with Russia in Ukraine and with Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. The twenty-first-century version of Mutual Assured Destruction in a nuclear war has become MAD from an economic collapse, the stabilizing factor in maintaining a superpower balance.

I have a friend who is an expert on Taiwan, with decades of experience in both Republican and Democratic administrations. To preserve what access is possible now, I’ll quote him without further identification:

Trump’s handling of Taiwan during his Beijing trip was a major setback for US Asia policy, worrisome not only for Taiwan but also for allies including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines.

Xi spent hours feeding Trump his view on Taiwan. Now Trump has bought it and repeats it as doctrine: “China has controlled Taiwan for thousands of years; Lai Ching-te is actively moving toward declaring Taiwan independence; all cross-strait tension is the fault of the separatists in Taiwan.”

After being brainwashed Trump now says these things publicly as the facts about Taiwan. He says he is delaying a decision on the latest arms purchase as a very good bargaining chip. In reality it may not be true leverage since Beijing insists we agreed to phase out arms sales in the unfortunate 1982 joint policy communique.

Using Taiwan arms sales as a chip with Beijing is unprecedented and violates the commitments of the Taiwan Relations Act. This administration has been quietly asking our Asian allies to be clear on what they would do in the event of an attack or blockade on Taiwan. Now they will wonder if we are committed to Taiwan.

Xi has framed our new relationship as “constructive strategic stability.” Trump seems to have embraced that slogan. The classic Chinese negotiating strategy is to get your opponent to agree to a framework concept. The opponent soon realizes that he has stepped into quicksand. The Chinese use the framework to veto everything they dislike. In this case, Beijing will use it to veto arms sales and other interactions with Taiwan they dislike.

The only solace is the senior figures in the administration with any influence and most of the Congress will in many ways continue to operate as if nothing has changed. Even the arms package could (probably will) be cut up and notified to Congress piecemeal by the State Department. And everyone including Xi Jinping knows that Trump can change his mind tomorrow. But the damage has been done.

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In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published her classic Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which she spent months working as a hotel maid, waitress, nursing home aide, and superstore clerk. The national minimum wage at the time was $5.15 an hour.

In 2026, the national minimum wage is just $7.25. The highest state or local minimum wage, in Washington, D.C., is $17.95, all the better to serve our elected officials.

More numbers to consider.

The median annual income for a full-time worker in the United States is about $60,000. And a year’s forty-hour work week at the Washington, D.C., minimum wage totals $37,336, which means a full-time worker with a family of four is barely above the official poverty level of $33,000.

Ehrenreich died in 2022, celebrated for her fierce understanding of American inequality. By every measure, the inequalities have gotten greater in recent years.

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One of these days, and probably in the not-too-distant future, one of the approximately one thousand individual billionaires in the United States will be worth a trillion dollars.

So, here’s my imaginary challenge, imaginary only because I no longer commission new books, as I did for so long as a publisher. But if I still did, this would be at the top of my list: Find a billionaire willing to spend a year living on the national median income of $60,000, without access to all the splendor and resources that money provides the very rich.

If there’s a literary agent involved, I’ll leave it to that person and the publisher to wrangle over the advance, to be paid at the successful conclusion of the year, plus, of course, full royalties on the books sold in print, ebook, and audio.

I wonder what daily life is like for the approximately 1.3 million American households in the top 1 percent of wealth. Different in most respects from everyone else, except that they still use have to use the bathroom for its traditional purposes.

The idea for the book challenge came to me recently, on a day when I was on the phone changing a flight reservation, using points for a hotel room in New York, and driving to the auto dealership for help with a check engine light on the dashboard and also a warning that my tires needed air.

My wife and I live on annual household budget significantly larger than any of the national or median income figures I’ve cited. But we are responsible for the management of what we do, when and how and what it all costs.

We have all the conveniences of a comfortable life, a car (with indoor parking), central air conditioning, enough property and health insurance for peace of mind, savings and retirement accounts that (so far) have not been upended by the swings in equity markets and are managed by a responsible financial adviser. We can vacation on Lake Michigan at a family home.

In short, we are far from having to make do within the national income averages.

But we are responsible for keeping track of our expenses, making all our own appointments, reservations, and plans.

And that is where the test becomes real for our imaginary billionaires. If they use a computer, an iPad, or a smartphone, they are at the mercy of the disciplines imposed by technology. There is rarely a week when I don’t have to untangle some glitch on a device. I pay annually for Best Buy’s Geek Squad and often resort to YouTube, a younger family member, or a tech support name I find on the internet.

What if you suddenly had to do all this yourself? What if you had to apply for a mortgage or a credit card, or had to pay an unexpected tax bill in the thousands of dollars. What about a new roof or sewer system that was not in your budget?

Billionaires delegate most things to someone else.

Every so often, an item appears about a billionaire or politician who can’t handle something like a self-checkout at a grocery store. The most famous of these was actually unfair: When President George H. W. Bush was running for reelection in 1992, he seemed to be baffled by a supermarket barcode. His team insisted he was not.

The principle remains. What characterizes life in the median is how to make the most and best of what you have, and proficiency in day-to-day life.

So step up, Ms. or Mr. Billionaire, and take the challenge. I’m predicting the book would be a money-making bestseller.

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Viktor Orban, the former prime minister of Hungary, had many fans in MAGA, led by Donald Trump and including organizations like CPAC and influencers like Tucker Carlson, who broadcast encomiums from Budapest.

Orban was the avatar for authoritarian illiberalism, in twenty-first-century parlance.

And then, summarily, the voters of Hungary ousted him on April 12, with an overwhelming election victory for his opponent, Peter Magyar.

Exactly what this will mean for Hungary will take time to evolve. Orban’s tentacles in Hungarian society and politics remain deep. But he has accepted his departure, resigning from parliament. His supporters seem to know their movement is done, at least for now.

The demise of Orban is significant for a number of reasons:

(1) He and his regime had done everything possible to manipulate the results in their favor. And the majority against him was so large that denial of the results was impossible.

(2) George Soros was deemed Orban’s political enemy, with the prime minister joining revanchists and antisemites elsewhere in demonizing him. Soros shrugged off most of these personal attacks, but Hungary was his homeland. Now, at age ninety-five, Soros has outlasted Orban. Bravo!

(3) The election results in Hungary, placed in the context of developments elsewhere in what had been the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites, reflect an important reality in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The fifteen republics of the USSR and the satellites have largely gone their own way since 1991. Many have reverted to their historical place in the world. Central Asia and the Caucasus nations, for instance, are truculent, varied in size, but no longer actually controlled by the Kremlin, although they are very aware of Russia’s regional dominance.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in a different realm of consequences for the region, with Vladimir Putin capable, at any time, of unprovoked menace.

For many of the nations of Eastern Europe — Bulgaria, Romania, and the states that once made up Yugoslavia — it is challenging to keep up with their twists and turns. But their examples do not pose a threat to democracies elsewhere, as Hungary seemingly did.

My particular interest has been the most prominent of the former East bloc nations: Poland, what was Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. All have been wrangling with their identities.

Poland is an economic success and a major member of the European Union. It swings politically from liberalism to nationalism, with traditional splits among the church, urbanites, and (broadly defined) farmers and workers.

Czechoslovakia split in two in 1993. Prague seems to be where the young and cool congregate. Slovakia leans toward illiberalism.

I don’t know enough about Hungary to explain the developments there. So, I was referred to Tibor Dessewffy, the director of the Digital Sociology Research Center at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

I put two questions to him by email:

Can you explain why Orban so readily conceded? That is not generally in the autocrat’s approach.

Were Hungarians surprised at the success of their popular will?

Here are his answers:

Orbán’s concession has to be understood in the context of what was truly a historic and unprecedented victory for the opposition TISZA — a genuine knockout blow for Orbán. In that sense, his quick concession was less an act of magnanimity than an attempt to bring a bitter evening to a close as swiftly as possible.

I am fairly certain that had the result been a narrow, neck-and-neck defeat, the reaction would have been very different. On a micro level, however, he was probably right to shut the evening down quickly and not allow the sense of shock and pain to deepen further. If reports are accurate, he had been prepared for a different kind of outcome — losing some support on the party list while still prevailing in the individual districts.

What he did not anticipate was a landslide of this scale.

This also leads to your second question. The result was genuinely astonishing for almost everyone. Although there were one or two polling institutes measuring a significant TISZA lead, after sixteen years of illiberalism and four painful opposition defeats, very few people truly dared to believe that such a moment, winning by supermajority could actually arrive.

The eruption of joy and the extraordinary emotional release on election night was partly rooted in this disbelief as well.

With these responses in mind, I wondered what the message for Americans and our “allies and partners” around the world would be.

Yes, the situation does seem dire. In the United States, the Democrats have yet to display the leadership style and the potential nominees necessary to defeat MAGA in 2028. In Europe and Asia, illiberalism is a threat or a reality. Hungary demonstrates that if the resistance and popular will align and mobilize, even the improbable can happen.

The U.S. midterm elections will be the first real test of MAGA’s enduring power, a forecast for Trump’s remaining years and the scale of popular demands for democracy over autocracy. I hope the results will be unequivocal, as they needed to be and were in Hungary.

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I really, truly resist reading bleats among the aging or elderly about their aches and pains. Toddlers, teenagers, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, everyone has issues.

But I have recently and conclusively understood the phenomenon that those of us born in the 1940s and 1950s (and now even the 1960s) are enduring: Being taken for granted — or worse, blamed.

This comes in two forms:

The Boomers Blew It and You Are So Done (Forget “Baby,” As the Oldest Are Turning Eighty This Year)

The author Marc J. Dunkelman (sorry, Marc) published a widely discussed book last year called Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — And How to Bring It Back. Because PublicAffairs, the imprint I founded thirty years ago, was the publisher, he asked me to lunch.

His opener was along the line that the vast Boomer generation, broadly speaking, is responsible for the situation he was describing, chapter and verse. I won’t do him the disrespect of summarizing his argument. For that, read the book. I bristled but I think I paid for the lunch at an Upper West Side diner.

The Boomer canard has taken hold, even among many Boomers themselves. An accomplished friend’s new book opens this way: “Well, we are now on the front stoop of old age. And good Lord, what a fuck up of a generation we’ve turned out to be. . . . A nation that used to be young and scrappy has gotten old and cranky. We’re aggrieved, tribal, stuck.” And on and on.

But ask yourself whether the rights of women, minorities, the disabled, the poor, and the disadvantaged are being ignored, as they were for so for very long. Living standards and healthy life spans in developed countries have increased markedly, and global poverty has dropped.

The process of change reached its most intense in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Boomers were in college, or in the streets.

Have the movements for civil rights, human rights, global environment solved those problems? No. Did we or our predecessor generations solve the bigotry, inequality, and injustice that are the underside of progress? No. But we did recognize the scale of these problems and have made headway, at least, in understanding them and doing what we can — yes, through regulations, affirmative action, and protests — to deal with civilization’s eternal failings.

The Boomers in power (Bill Clinton et al.), as in all political eras, coped with the political realities of the time, and with the fact that their, well, fallibilities were now exposed by a feisty media. FDR and JFK, among others, were spared the public embarrassments of infidelity.

Heroism is hard to maintain when then the main public themes are cynical and even despairing.

If you don’t want more of this, stop reading, now.

Being Taken for Granted, Superannuated, or Retired

I started to realize this in my seventies. The emails and phone calls I received from my generational cohort were about not being published, finding an agent, and feeling generally sidelined (except, it seems, in top-tier politics). The general sense among this broad circle of formers and has-beens was, depending on their personalities, a degree of ironic amusement at their predicament, chagrin, indignation, or fury.

“How dare they?” Well, they could and did.

Being taken for granted showed in different ways, from the routine to the existential. Dealing with doctors whose attention tended to be cursory until you stepped up for concierge service, the condescension of younger colleagues whom you had mentored and now were offering to support further, or a dismissive attitude from the staff at various places, especially when dealing with tech.

So how to manage this?

A seemingly trivial episode recently provided my forward strategy. While I was exercising one morning in our apartment building gym, a manager approached me, with a photographer in tow, and told me that pictures were to be taken for advertising. He asked me to wait outside while that was being done.

I paused to absorb the affront, smiled, and with brio declared, “No.” The photographer, to his credit, got the point and waited.

What was my valuable takeaway?

In dealing with the various forms of being taken for granted and blamed, instead of reacting with indignation and even (on occasion) anger, stand on your good-natured ground. Be distinguished to the extent possible, rather than demeaned.

If they are fortunate enough, everyone dispensing such an attitude and criticism will get to be older or even elderly.

But by then they will also be experienced and seasoned — and definitely not to be taken for granted.

*****

Paul Taylor’s book, quoted above, is This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk. Paul and his wife, Stefanie, “have been together since childhood,” he writes. They have three children and five grandchildren. Paul had a great run at the Washington Post, where we met. He then served as executive vice president at the Pew Research Center. About herself, Stefanie writes: “Paul has written a lot of cool things about me. Take them with a grain of salt.”

Paul’s take on our mutual stage of life is different in many respects from mine as expressed above. Read his book and decide for yourself. That is our privilege.

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“On his last state visit [in 1985], Charles was in the shade of Diana’s radiance. On this one, he radiated an élan of his own — a class act, shining next to the boorish Trump. At long last, Charles was in no one’s shadow. At 77, he has done what he always yearned to to do: make his mark on the world.”

— Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times, May 2, 2026

********************************

In 1982 the Outlook section of the Washington Post published an interview I conducted with then-Prince Charles. Decades later, as King Charles III, some of what he said is worth recalling. The text was approved by Charles at the time.

In answer to my first question: What can you do to cope with the serious economic problems, particularly the unemployment in Britain today?

Charles replied:

“Often you sit there and think — what the hell can I do? The problem is enormous and its like banging your head against an immense brick wall: it never seems to have any effect. But its very interesting how if you bang your head against one bit of the wall, eventually you will dislodge a bit of the brick, or you might knock one out and at that point you are achieving something. My philosophy has been that its better to begin something in a tiny small way which has the possibility of growing into something larger, than not to attempt it all.

“Or, on the other hand to attempt something large which fizzles out rather ignominiously. Which is the other severe danger: that if you try and do something in too large and loud a way, you raise everybody’s expectations and then can’t fulfill them which actually [is] more dangerous I think because it increases possible bitterness and frustration.

“But I hope to now, through . . . various organizations — one I started about eight or nine years ago [is] called ‘The Prince’s Trust.’ I wanted to try and get at the areas which I felt at that stage were the most important. [They] were those of the rather alienated young, in particular some of them in inner cities of this country who felt very much neglected. [They] I suppose felt completely alienated from society and from anything to do with the establishment, as such. I think there is a growing proportion of people like that, not just the young, but those who have families and so on, who are frightened even of doctors and teachers — they represent authority and the establishment.

“How then do we get through to these people and make them aware that there are people prepared to try and help. So this is how the Trust started. As a result, I’ve built a large number of contacts, people in all walks of life, those who deal with social work, probation and aftercare for young offenders. All these people are very keen to see ways of improving the situation. And through a trust like mine, there’s an opportunity to get things done without too much red tape.”

As published, the Post singled out two of Charles’s comments for particular attention. They were:

“You see my problem . . . is I don’t actually have a role to play. . . . I am heir to the throne, full stop. That’s all. . . . I could go and play polo all over the world, I suppose.”

“It may sound silly, but I think I did have to struggle. . . . [It gives] me a different sort of outlook perhaps than some of my predecessors might have had. Purely because I had to struggle.”

***************

King Charles III, for so long a prince in uneasy limbo, accompanied by his well and true life partner, Queen Camilla, was duly rewarded for his patience and soared in comparison to his host, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of these United States of America. The king, examined by arbiters of such matters in Washington, was pronounced properly seasoned, proving that dignity refined over many years wears well (as do finely tailored suits).

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Recently, Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal was interviewed by Press Gazette, a widely read newsletter on journalism, based in the U.K.. Tucker reported on how much the Journal has grown in subscribers since she took over at the start of 2023, moving from the editorship of The Sunday Times in London. These are two of the flagship publications controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Overall, she said, print and digital subscriptions have increased by 20 percent to 4.68 million. While that is roughly a third of the number of the New York Times’s subscribers, it is about twice the reported number for the Washington Post.

Here is Tucker’s explanation for why that increase has happened:

The Wall Street Journal, she said on her arrival, would give readers the “new distinctive, useful, compelling, relevant journalism” they needed.

“I asked the newsroom to get behind that strategy. I also made structural changes to the newsroom to enable it to get behind that strategy. They did, and the results have been incredibly good.

“I would never rest on my laurels, and there’s still work to be done, but the strategy is working. It just goes to show you when a newsroom as, frankly, brilliant as the Wall Street Journal’s gets collectively behind a very clear strategy, you get results.”

There are two observations to be made about Tucker’s comments and her success.

I have only met her once, soon after she arrived, at a friend’s one-table dinner of probably sixteen people, most of whom were connected, one way or another, to the New York–based media. I was amazed at how critical Tucker was of the news organization she was leading. She took on Washington coverage, the foreign report, the Saturday review section (a particular favorite of mine), and the overall desultory vibe.

The editorial pages and book reviews are under the long-time aegis of Paul Gigot and adhere to a right-wing or conservative perspective that is usually less vituperative than the language and politics of Trump-era MAGA. She had no comments on that part of the Journal.

I wondered whether it was really a good idea for Tucker to trash her news organization among people who might well spread the word that could be embarrassing to her. I thought not, although I recognized that she must have been given a mandate from Murdoch to shake things up.

And that was my second thought. Stipulate that, on the whole, I think Murdoch’s impact on the media has been profound and negative. Fox News is the source, in many ways, of America’s crisis of politics and morality.

But Murdoch is driven by what he considers news values for his businesses, which is why in the almost twenty years he has owned Dow Jones and the Journal, the news organization has mostly maintained its stature at the higher end of American journalism.

One episode in particular impressed me. Murdoch had invested a reported $125 million in Elizabeth Holmes’s biotech startup Theranos, which she claimed would transform medicine. It was the Journal’s reporting that revealed her company to be a fraud and eventually sent her to prison.

As recounted in John Carreyrou’s brilliant book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Holmes came to New York to plead with Murdoch to stop the Journal’s coverage. Among other things, she said, Murdoch had all that money at risk.

He refused, specifically telling her, according to Carreyrou, who was then a Journal reporter, that he would not interfere with the news coverage.

Again, Rupert Murdoch’s approach to journalism is far from pristine, but he does understand what makes news — and what drives subscriptions and advertising to his company.

Here’s my aside: As I have written before, Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneurial genius, but he has shown, conclusively, that he does not understand that successful journalism comes from the energy and distinctive quality of its content, even in the data-driven digital world.

(That The Washington Post won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service on May 3, the same day that Bezos is hosting the Met Gala does suggest ironic destiny. )

As a daily reader of the Wall Street Journal’s online news output and, leisurely, in print on Saturday, I look forward to it (after my daily absorption of the New York Times and Financial Times) because there are news and features I find intriguing and have not already read elsewhere.

A story about the “lewd” birthday greeting that Donald Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 led the president to sue the Journal for $10 billion, except that it turned out the greeting was in the extensive files on Epstein that were released over time. The suit was later dismissed.

Scandalous Trump revelations are frequent. But it was also the case that the most thorough coverage of Joe Biden’s aging was in the Journal and was immediately ascribed to the animus and bias of the Murdoch forces, a foray into pro-Trumpism.

In fact, the record and history shows that compelling journalism is going to be an equal opportunity offender of the powers that be, which Tucker clearly recognizes. And she and her invigorated newsroom are bringing that and more to the impressive news organization that the Wall Street Journal has become.

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The link below is to a group of essays about the late Marshall Shulman, just published by the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum at Columbia University. The authors were specialists in what a half century ago was the USSR and is now Russia, a nuclear-armed autocracy as menacing as it was then, perhaps more so. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Russia was deemed less central to global order until Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Compared to the expertise reflected in these writings, current official U.S. policy and understanding of Russia is a dangerous mess.

https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/JervisForum-Tribute-Shulman.pdf

Here is my contribution:

Marshall Shulman entered our lives on a rainy night in Moscow in early fall of 1974. We had recently arrived. I was the Washington Post correspondent with a three-year assignment. By then, my wife Susan and I already realized that because so little was available from official Soviet sources and the very circumspect US diplomats working at the embassy, even the most esteemed American visitors wanted to be in touch with journalists representing the major US newspapers and magazines as providers of information and insight. They also welcomed the modicum of hospitality we could provide, including dollops of black-market caviar.

Our apartment was in a foreigners’ compound on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where militia at the entrance monitored the arriving guests. The clear understanding was that visitors and residents like us would have to accept the KGB reporting the American connection, perhaps for retribution. On that night, Marshall was waved through routinely by the militia. But in the process he was soaked, head to toe, in the torrential downpour. So it was that our first session with an enduring friend, whom we considered among the wisest American experts on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was conducted with him wearing a bathrobe that barely covered his knees.

US-Soviet relations in the 1970s, which in hindsight marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War that culminated in 1991 with the final implosion of the USSR, were a composite of intermittent forays at détente, navigating hardline American animus and the Kremlin’s defensive suspicions. There were many major issues: how to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split, competition for influence around the developing world, the reality of enmity in the Indochina conflicts, and negotiations to restrain nuclear weapons, which everyone understood was essential to preserving civilization.

And what were broadly termed Human Rights. The movement in support of Jewish emigration was especially well organized. After the 1967 Arab-Israel war, a substantial portion of Jews in the Soviet republics sought the goal of a more enriching life, in every sense of the term, in Israel and the United States.

The emigration issue served purposes in both Moscow and Washington. Antisemitism had deep roots in Russia, and using exit visas to portray Jewish apostasy was cynically satisfying to the Kremlin. And, with the issue being led by Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash) and a fiercely anti-Soviet US political mainstream, measuring exit visas became a valuable asset in setting parameters for the relationship, particularly on trade benefits.

The Helsinki Accords in 1975 codified human rights as an area for East-West disputes and negotiation. With celebrated writers and scientists at the forefront, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the dissident movement was an asset for demanding changes in the USSR and an excuse by the KGB to crack down on critics and criticism.

What was exceptional about Marshall, and unusual among other American scholars and officials who were monitoring the USSR, was that he understood the complexities of ideology and competition which framed the way superpowers maneuvered for dominance.

Everybody had to be placed in the categories of that time: Anti-Soviet, soft on communism, socialist leaning, liberal, conservative, leftist, rightist, hawk, dove. Marshall recognized that the autocracy of Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo was flailing in many respects, especially economic policy and chronologically geriatric.

That the USSR was a formidable military adversary with the capacity to encourage global tensions and wage unspeakable destruction was undeniable. But Shulman had aligned himself with George Kennan’s view that exaggerating the Soviet threat tended to serve US political interests by providing the reasoning for defense expenditure and a sprawling intelligence apparatus.

In the 1980s, when the head of the USA and Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that in Perestroika and Glasnost that the Soviets were “doing the worst thing we could do to you Americans, denying you an enemy,” I heard truth in his sly appraisal.

After Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 and his appointment of Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger’s years was replaced by the split between Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, which was marked by differences in personality as well as strategy. Carter’s emphasis on human rights, combined with Brzezinski’s deep anti-Russian animus, was a contrast to Vance’s more traditionally diplomatic approach. As a senior adviser to Vance on the Soviets, Shulman was on that side of the divide.

And here is a personal explanation for why Marshall’s assessment of US-Soviet relations resonated with me as it did: I admired and wrote about the dissidents and the repressive policies of the Kremlin. But I also sensed that focusing so heavily on those issues meant underestimating equally important aspects of Soviet reality. While the West tended to call the Soviet empire “Russia,” it was in fact an uneasy composite of nationalities and their histories that made Kremlin control less complete than it seemed.

In the twenty-first century, the war with Ukraine is the most striking example of the impact of the breakup of the USSR. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia is no longer master of its once massive domain. In dealing with the Soviet Union as an indomitable and eternal entity, an imperial power that was comparable to Rome and Britain at their pinnacles, the US missed underlying weaknesses. The USSR did not work. It had an ersatz economy, its projection of unity was essentially superficial, and its leadership was sclerotic.

Shulman believed that engaging with Soviet society, within the broader context of the much-disputed term détente, served a positive purpose for the United States. He held that the US would gain much more than it could lose in that approach to the relationship.

An aside about the Kremlin’s cockeyed sense of wpower in that era: in the early years after the Soviet collapse, Central Committee archives were open to researchers. A friend found a Top-Secret Central Committee document signed by then KGB head Yuri Andropov about a 1977 Politburo meeting where the debate was about “Korrespondent Osnos,” Joseph Presel, who was a young diplomat at the American Embassy, and Natan Sharansky, a dissident who played a role in advocacy for democracy and emigration.

I was assailed in the Soviet media as a CIA agent but not expelled; Presel had a lengthy State Department career in the former Soviet republics; and Sharansky spent nine years in the Gulag after a trial for anti-Soviet activities before being released and moving to Israel. That the Kremlin’s most senior officials would devote so much attention to three young men with no discernible power, I concluded, reflected their profound insecurity and declining confidence.

Calling attention to the Kremlin’s weakness was less welcome in official circles than warning of the Soviet Union’s encroaching power. Preeminence in Washington is associated with ambition and an affinity for the limelight. Marshall was by nature soft-spoken and, from what we observed, genial. He was content to be a lodger at Averell Harriman’s Georgetown homestead, which made him ancillary to the capital’s elite. Combined with his sophisticated assessment of Soviet power rather than the reductive commitment to the Cold War that was then in fashion, Marshall’s influence was never great.

When Shulman became the first director of Columbia’s W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Susan and I continued to enjoy the company of Marshall and his beloved and formidable wife, Collette. We would discuss in depth what was happening in the USSR, but we were now observing this absorbing, infuriating country and no longer directly in the competitive fray for attention or impact.

Who knows what Marshall Shulman’s role might have been in managing President Vladimir Putin’s dangerously uncontrollable Russia? I am certain he would have advice and judgment that would be well worth taking seriously.

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The history of Judaism has seen multiple cataclysms — the Inquisition, exclusion, expulsion, pogroms, genocide — but what is happening now is something different.

Israel is upending what it means to be Jewish in the United States, where the majority of the diaspora has lived and thrived. At issue is not Jewish identity. It is about how American Jews relate to the State of Israel.

The era that began after the devastation of the Holocaust, with the establishment of the State of Israel, is ending because the Jewish state has evolved into a land that many (probably a majority) of American Jews cannot fathom, given the scale of violence and vengeance that the government has chosen as policy.

This is not the place to argue who is most responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian enmity that is so pervasive and destructive, because that avoids what the inescapable consequence seems to be in the United States.

Biases toward and against Israelis and Palestinians are genuine, but they obscure the point: Israel is no longer, for many American Jews, the answer to Jewish hopes and aspirations. It has become instead the major source of angst, family disputes, and renewed broad-based antisemitism.

Every measure of the American Jewish population shows deep divisions by generation, by adherence to religious rituals, and by political principles from left to right.

The schism has been developing for decades, but the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s responses in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon are what have created an unprecedented crisis.

The protests on university campuses on behalf of Palestinians, the surge in harassment of Jewish students, the performative fostering of rage by Donald Trump and his cohort — all have combined to produce a deep divide between those who see Israel as a pariah led by a brutal despot and those who consider it a warrior state determined to protect itself and its interests.

The cause of Zionism has fostered disagreement for as long as anyone can remember or document. But Israel is an established and immutable reality, and that will not change. So what, actually, does Israel now represent to Jews who do not live there?

For the last half century, being Jewish in America reached an apogee of influence, prosperity, and acceptance in every sphere of life that in the past might have been restricted. Bigotry never fully disappears, but discrimination on religious grounds — quotas, enforced segregation in business and social circles — had become minimal.

For many American Jews, being Jewish did not have to be their primary identifier. How they were perceived in the whys and wherefores of politics was not tied tightly to their opinions about Israel. For decades, the percentage of Jews and non-Jews marrying and in every respect sharing their lives has increased dramatically.

The underlying issues have been simmering all along. Human Rights Watch, the largest and most important organization of its kind, was founded and strongly supported with money from Jewish philanthropists, and it has stumbled repeatedly on how to best monitor human rights in an Israeli democracy that avowedly discriminates against its Palestinian citizens and neighbors.

As foreign editor of the Washington Post in the late 1970s, a time when it appeared that there could be progress on an Arab-Israeli détente, I was assailed with complaints by readers about bias of one kind or another on this issue, more than every other matter combined.

The situation now is incomparably more contentious.

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I have just finished reading Nicholas Lemann’s soulful (meant as a compliment) new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. The book portrays in breadth and detail the story of his family, who emigrated from Germany in the 1830s, settled in Louisiana, and prospered in many ways.

As time went on, the family moved away from its Jewish origins in pursuit of a social acceptance that being outwardly or observantly Jewish would make unlikely.

The Lemann family’s story is aligned with and recognizable to what I have seen and personally experienced in my lifetime among friends and family. “How Jewish do you want to be?” was the question.

I was born in a time when being Jewish was existentially threatened by Nazism and fascism. The threats now are of other kinds: values, respect, shame, obloquy, misapplied pride. Israel has been lost as a unifying feature, which it never completely was anyway, and has become corrosive to a dangerous degree.

Lemann’s personal response has been to embrace Judaism completely, which, as he describes it, is about religious ritual and association. His joy in doing so has shifted his life away from melancholy.

Adopting this as a solution is not applicable, from my perspective, for many American Jews, whose observances goes from rare to casual to regular, as a part of life but not its core, which is how Lemann now sees it.

And it does not answer the fundamental conundrum: What about Israel, the Jewish homeland, the refuge from centuries of persecution and isolation?

That is why this is a different Jewish crisis from those of the past.

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My good friend Steven Weisman, the author of The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion, is writing another book that addresses this theme. He summarized his thoughts for me:

“Judaism under Roman subjugation was rife with internal conflicts over how much Jews should assimilate, whether religious or civil authority should govern them, governance infighting among priestly class and heirs to the overthrown royal family of Hasmoneans (the ones that had ruled for a hundred years after Judah Maccabee kicked out the Seleucids).

“There were also class conflicts over objection to heavy tax burdens. These conflicts weakened Jewish society and allowed Romans to exploit their divisions and take over after the Jewish War of 67-70 CE.”

The challenge today is not from the Romans, the Arabs, or the Iranians. It comes from the Jews themselves, who find it so very hard to resolve what Israel means to them anymore.

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“We believe that peace is at hand.”

— National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, signaling the end of a U.S. role in the Vietnam war, October 26, 1972

“We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.”

— President Richard Nixon, announcing what he called the end of the war in Vietnam, January 23, 1973

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In the Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973, the United States recovered all of its prisoners of war from North Vietnam and from the Viet Cong in the South, and agreed to withdraw the remaining American forces from the country. Significantly, the agreement allowed North Vietnam’s troops to remain in the South, and the United States pledged continuing aid to its allies in Indochina to offset the North’s military presence.

On August 22, 1973, President Richard Nixon nominated Henry Kissinger to be secretary of state, in addition to retaining his post as national security adviser. He was confirmed by the Senate a month later. In August 1974, Nixon resigned under pressure from the Watergate scandal.

In a succession of votes over the following months, Congress blocked assistance to the Indochina countries. There was no interest in supporting them anymore. Entreaties from Kissinger and from the new president, Gerald Ford, were unsuccessful.

On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and unified the country under communist rule. By then Cambodia had fallen to the communist Khmer Rouge, and in December the communist Pathet Lao seized power in Laos.

That is how America’s Vietnam war came to an end. Fifty years later, Vietnam is an authoritarian one-party state and economically strong. Cambodia and Laos are stable but essentially irrelevant in the global balance of power.

Tom Wells, a historian, has just published The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations, six hundred pages of transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls with President Nixon and others, starting in 1969 and ending with Nixon’s resignation.

Kissinger had the original tape recordings destroyed (recognizing what they had done to Nixon) and resisted releasing the transcripts until he was compelled to do so.

I read (savored, to be honest) the book, to understand how Kissinger (who died on November 29, 2023, at the age of one hundred) maintained his stature as one of the most consequential diplomats — if not the most consequential — of his very lengthy tenure on the world stage.

What enabled Kissinger to sustain his aura for so long, and against a record of abject failure in Indochina? How did he pull off this reputational endurance?

Kissinger was brilliant at many things. But his greatest genius was at spinning, shaping every conversation, with the president and everyone else, to meet his always self-referential requirements.

What that meant was a masterful skill at dissembling, misrepresentation, flattering, gossiping, and what seemed to be self-deprecating humorous asides, but was actually a tactical device to engage a critical interlocutor.

I was especially interested in the Kissinger-Nixon conversations about Vietnam from 1970 to 1973, the years when I was a correspondent in Indochina for the Washington Post. I could see the real-world implications of what they were saying about the war, the U.S. military, the bombing of North Vietnam, civilian casualties, and the South Vietnamese leadership as the pressure for a deal increased, whether they liked it or not.

In their conversations, Kissinger’s cynicism was a clever cudgel encouraging Nixon’s brooding, with sneering references to, among others, Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and the “pansies” in the State Department.

With war raging and hundreds of thousands American soldiers on the ground, I was especially struck by the way Nixon and Kissinger talked about the military, including the top U.S. commanders.

Kissinger characterized General William Westmoreland, the Army chief of staff and previously the commander of American forces in Vietnam, this way: “Completely played out. All he remembers is what happened in Vietnam and how nearly he won the war at Tet” in 1968.

General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s successor as U.S. commander and the man responsible for implementing the Nixon administration’s policy of “Vietnamization,” turning over military responsibility to the South Vietnamese and overseeing the withdrawal of U.S. forces, fared little better. Kissinger said he was “finished,” to which Nixon agreed.

Nixon and Kissinger’s complaints about Abrams tended to focus on his reluctance to use all-out air power to pummel North Vietnam into an agreement. Along the way, Nixon said that Abrams was “drinking too much,” and contemplated sending another general to outrank him.

(In 1980, the Army named its new main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, to honor him.)

As early as 1969, only months after his inauguration, Nixon told Kissinger that the Saigon government’s belief in eventual victory “won’t happen . . . it is impossible.”

And after the 1973 peace treaty, it was widely known that Kissinger had said that there would now be a “decent interval” for the South to survive before the ultimate triumph of the North Vietnamese.

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The full panoply of the transcripts include, for comic relief as much as anything else, discussions of Kissinger’s dating of actresses and flirting with other notable women, including his efforts to inveigh the television journalist Barbara Walters to join him privately in various venues.

My favorite of these concerned a story that was about to appear in the Washington Post that one of Kissinger’s starlets had made her name in soft-core porn. Kissinger pleaded with the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, not to run the story.

There is no indication that the story ever appeared.

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I learned of The Kissinger Tapes through an interview with Tom Wells on Brian Lamb’s weekly podcast, Booknotes+.

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“Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of systems it depends on. Plants tend the life of the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities, along with much else.”

— From the introduction to Maintenance: Of Everything by Stewart Brand

In 1968, Stewart Brand and his colleagues published the first Whole Earth Catalog, which was essentially a guide to self-sufficiency during an increasing complicated time. Steve Jobs once called Brand’s catalog a sort of “Google before Google came along.”

Brand is now eighty-seven years old. So, I was surprised in December 2025 to read a laudatory review in the Wall Street Journal of Brand’s latest book, Maintenance: Of Everything, written in his signature style — eccentric but completely accessible.

I was especially pleased because over the past year or two, I have used “maintenance” in my personal lexicon of definitions: “repositioning” instead of retirement; “offspring” instead of children, for those who are now adults (Donald Trump Jr., et al.); and recognizing that calling something “old” was rarely a compliment.

Maintenance is the effort and practice of keeping things in as good shape as possible, beginning most basically with “brush your teeth,” if you want to keep them intact.

But maintenance extends far beyond self-care. My approach is to wrangle the daunting complexities of modern life, to make them manageable when I can. Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, said it well, in reflecting on the company’s fifty-year history: “It’s hard doing simple; it’s easy doing complex.” The writer’s version of this is “If I had more time to finish this, I could make it shorter.”

I’ll get back to health.

But first, technology has become the dominant complicating factor for those of us who remember the before-times of analog. For example, when renting a car, I used to ask for roll-up windows and a simple dashboard. The more widgets, the more distractions, the more things that can go wrong: a loose gas cap and time spent at the dealership rebooting the safety systems.

How to be a safe driver? It took me decades to focus my total attention behind the wheel. The simple seat belt has doubtless saved millions of lives, just pull and click.

In the Vietnam era, GIs wore inexpensive “non-maintainable” watches — just the time, sometimes with the date and a night light. Those that remain are now vintage artifacts, fashionable and, as antiques, expensive.

Devices are indispensable but can be unfathomably complicated, defying even the experts employed by Apple. I recently replaced a pair of lost earbuds with a set that was slipping out of my ears; I went to the Apple store to get a pair with rubber tips. I had the receipt and the buds.

Over the next hour, as many as four Apple employees were deployed to figure out why my phone would not update the “find my phone” capacity, which had to be done for the buds to be exchanged, I was told. Finally, duffer that I am, I pointed out that my phone did not have the storage space for the just-updated app. I admit to leaving feeling superior on behalf of my cohort.

Segueing to health. When the first Covid vaccines for people over sixty-five became available, to get an appointment required uploading the front and back of a Medicare card. Under the circumstances, that requirement seemed to me ridiculous given the target constituency.

I now know how to upload, but I recently had a medical appointment cancelled because I did not meet a deadline in advance for uploading the front and back of my insurance cards. That provider earned a blistering one-star review on Yelp.

Maintenance in health can be manageable. Regular checkups, recognizing that when you take daily meds for high blood pressure or a statin for cholesterol — that does not mean you are frail or failing. Like any machine, the body needs maintenance.

Brand’s book is billed as “Part One” and is derived from a website called “Books in Progress.” The maintenance the book describes is specifically about a round-the-world sailing competition, in which the winner turned out to be the racer who was best at maintenance on the high seas and motorcycle maintenance.

Neither of these are relevant to me, but the principle certainly is, expanding the term “maintenance,” in Brand’s words, “beyond referring only to preventive to stave off the trauma of repair — brushing the damn teeth etc. Let ‘maintenance’ mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.

“From that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the thing is part of the process.”

I’ll say here that there are some things that cannot be replaced. Body and soul are two. But they can be maintained.

This is how to buy Stewart Brand’s inspiring book.

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There were more than four million books published in the United States in 2025 with an ISBN identifier, an increase of 32.5 percent over 2024, according to statistics compiled by Bowker, which tracks such data.

For all those who say that book publishing is dead, dying, deteriorating, or about to be overwhelmed by AI: clearly not yet.

What it does mean is an amazing democratization of how to be an author. Because most of the increase was in self-published books, for which the number of print and ebook versions rose to 3.5 million in 2025, from 2.5 million in 2024.

What used to be dismissed as “vanity” publishing (and still often is) has become a large and lucrative business, with a number of ways to publish, from a handful of copies to bestseller numbers, supported to one degree or another by the authors, financially and in spreading the word.

A bit more about the numbers to make sense of them. The total number of books published in traditional ways rose by 6.6 percent, to nearly 650,000; half of those had BISAC codes, which classify the categories, such as fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and self-help, to be sold, placed in libraries, and entered into databases to be searched.

So what does all this activity really mean in practice?

First, major commercial or trade publishers are increasingly being led by experts in technology, digital distribution, and data, with the books themselves acquired and edited by employee professionals.

In February I hosted a conversation with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster. Karp started his publishing career in the 1980s as an editorial assistant at Random House earning $17,000 a year. He rose through the editorial ranks to become a publisher and then a chief executive.

After a lengthy search Greg Greeley was named to succeed Karp at Simon & Schuster. Greeley worked for nineteen years at Amazon, in the distribution divisions of that enormous enterprise. “He and his teams pioneered print-on-demand publishing, launched the company’s self-publishing platform, and expanded the company’s global audiobook and books marketplace capabilities,” the corporate press release said.

I recently wrote a piece extolling Gayle Feldman’s new biography, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, about the co-founder of Random House. The current CEO of what is now called Penguin Random House is Nihar Malaviya; his official biography says that he has “spearheaded the creation of a variety of industry-first capabilities in data science, supply chain, technology, and consumer insights.”

What do these executives know about the actual books?

Doomsayers will say that the companies see books as essentially roughage to be churned out, with minimal regard for content and quality.

Let me offer a different view. Books are commodities that people have to want to buy and read. It is the editors and publishers who acquire books and develop them into forms ready to be sold. Expertise in data and delivery makes the books more visible and accessible. Sure, crap will sell — it always has — but so will quality when consumers can find the books in the heaps that are appearing, in a format they want to read them.

Effective marketing a book from a single copy to millions is designed by people, assisted by the advances, for better and (alas) worse, in technology.

My belief has always been that the way to publish books well is to know who their prospective readers will be and then make sure they realize the book is available. Visibility and discovery are core to the process of reducing the enduring complaints of “I can’t find that book anywhere.”

What, then, is self-publishing in 2026, the overwhelming majority of those four million books last year?

The concept is still largely misunderstood. Explaining it fully requires much more than a post like this one. I can summarize it as follows: An author who writes a book finds a partner to render it in printed or digital form, with the costs partly or wholly carried by the writer. Self-publishing is not an author cranking out on a mimeograph machine or whatever today’s equivalent would be.

I am often contacted by friends (and some surprisingly notable acquaintances) who want to write a story, a memoir, a novel, a biography, or to share their experiences and expertise. This is a model I think can work for just about anyone:

Self-publishing in digital-only formats has its own infrastructure costs and reach, like the one developed at Amazon by Simon & Schuster’s new CEO. I know less about it other than that it delivers a finished text.

Books in print are still, for the majority of authors and readers, the preferred option.

Politics and Prose, a very popular bookstore in Northwest Washington, D.C., which I have written about before, has a service called Opus that offers a number of ways to publish a book at a base cost from $600 to $1,200, depending on what level of support the author wants, plus the cost of printing each copy, set by the page count and number of illustrations, with hardcover and paperback binding options.

Upheaval in book publishing aligns with the many other dizzying ways in which technology impacts our life and times. The reasons for concern, or even alarm, are apparent and emphasized.

The flip side is that if you want to write and publish a book, now you can.

Go for it!

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Matty (never Matthew) Goldberg, a good friend and esteemed member of the book publishing community, knows more about music than, I’m guessing, anyone you know. Every year he curates and sends out a playlist to his community. These are invariably excellent. He is now starting a Substack about music (about damn time!), and here is the subscription link.

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The lives of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy have been chronicled in countless ways, in facts and gauzy mythology.

If you are old enough to remember where you were on November 22, 1963, then it is probably your middle-aged offspring and grandchildren who are now watching Love Story, the soapy streamer about the short and tragic marriage of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.

By the numbers, the most read article in The New Yorker in 2025 was granddaughter Tatiana Kennedy Schlossberg’s account of the leukemia that was about to end her life.

Fascination with the Kennedy family persists long after its time, vexed now by the ignominy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role in Donald Trump’s cabinet.

JFK himself died long before he would have left a memoir. And Jackie, as she is always called, was considered more ethereal than practical or accessible in the way she was portrayed. As a woman of that era, she recognized that she was mainly examined for style.

That is why the book and audio Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, published in 2011, is so astonishing. The interviews were conducted in 1964 by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a close friend and presidential aide, only months after the assassination.

With the approval and a foreword by Caroline Kennedy, the book was published by Hyperion, a publisher then owned by the Walt Disney Company. It was briefly a bestseller and, from what I can tell, was largely forgotten. I came upon it in a classically twenty-first-century way, in a clip of a friendly interview that Caroline Kennedy did on David Letterman’s late-night show when the book came out.

I downloaded the audio and the ebook, and I was mesmerized.

The interviews must be the most immersive account of the marriage and JFK’s presidency, as lived by Jackie, that can possibly exist.

Why? Because the conversations are so personal, kept private for decades and candid in so many ways. There is sadness, of course, but little that is maudlin. Kennedy’s image has been blurred over the years by the revelations about his trysts with women even while in the White House, a reflection of prurience in contemporary history.

But in these interviews there is a marital intimacy that cannot be contrived, a loving partnership in which Jackie was a much more significant participant than she was thought to be.

She was in her mid-thirties, soft-spoken with a feminine lilt in her voice. My sense is that she chose in every meaningful way to be JFK’s beloved wife and mother of his children. She was not his mistress, and I suspect (though we’ll never know for sure) that both of them understood the difference.

There are many moments of vivid history. Less than a hundred days into JFK’s presidency came the Bay of Pigs disaster, in which a group of Cuban exiles launched an operation to overthrow Fidel Castro, with CIA support, which was an utter and humiliating failure.

How that happened, and JFK’s response, has been written about extensively, but never so poignantly and with an understanding of the circumstances and politics that surrounded it. The image Jackie paints of JFK in tears over the damage to his presidency so early in his term and his musings on the fate of the hapless Cubans are exceptionally visceral.

That episode was to shape the president’s brilliant handling of the October 1962 crisis in which the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of a nuclear confrontation. The Bay of Pigs experience was the reason that Kennedy overruled the generals and the CIA, who were advocating a military response, and instead imposed a naval embargo.

You can hear Jackie describe JFK’s suspicion of the military brass as only she could describe it, in pillow talk.

One of the significant moments in Kennedy’s pre-presidential life was the controversy over the authorship of Profiles in Courage, the book that won a Pulitzer Prize in biography, which was published after Kennedy had spent months recovering from back surgery.

A widespread belief was that most of the book had been really written by Ted Sorensen, a young aide and speechwriter. In Jackie’s view, that suspicion was fostered by Sorensen himself, for which she never could forgive or really trust him.

In explicit and sometimes cutting detail, Jackie describes how she and her husband felt about the major personalities of the era and how JFK shrewdly navigated political relationships in Washington, where this week’s opponent may of necessity be next week’s ally.

Jackie’s perception of some illustrious figures was very critical, including (and especially) Lyndon Johnson as vice president and Kennedy’s successor; Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whom JFK had decided to replace; Adlai Stevenson, twice defeated in his own presidential campaigns, who was “irritating”; and lesser figures like Mamie Eisenhower, who called the White House “her home” and was reluctant to show the incoming first lady around.

The private Jackie could be acerbic and emotional. In his own memoir, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tells of the night in 1967 when Jackie pounded on his chest pleading for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Only now can I see that fierceness in her appraisal of the people and events of the period.

Over the years, and having worked on books with Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan and read much about other presidential wives, I take the view that while the husbands had the egos and ambitions that made them presidents, it was their wives who felt the fullest brunt of the political years, especially the lows.

Jacqueline Kennedy cherished her marriage and admired her husband greatly. Through this private account of their lives together, I can see that this was true.

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In June 1976, Communist parties from East and West convened in East Berlin to consider the growing tide of Eurocommunism in countries like Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Washington was very concerned.

I covered the event for the Washington Post.

On a spring trip from Moscow to Venice, my wife and I had stayed at the luxurious Gritti Palace, with a letter of introduction to the manager. He was in despair, certain that in a year or so Italy would have a Communist government and the hotel would go under.

That did not happen. Nearly fifty years later, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez spent millions at the Gritti Palace, apparently in lavish luster, for their over-the-top wedding last summer.

Since the end of World War II, epochs, situations, and national groups have been defined in shorthand: the Cold War, the non-aligned, the Axis of Evil, the Global South, the end of colonialism, ISIS, and so forth. This year we were supposedly on the cusp of the era of Spheres of Influence, the world divided among three domineering powers: the United States, China, and Russia.

As it happened, within a few years after that East Berlin meeting, Eurocommunism’s influence peaked and ebbed. It is now the far right that poses the greatest threat to democracy and security. Looking around, what we see everywhere are forces massing to the left, right, north, south, east, and west. All these threats and violence amount (updating a previous term) to the New World Dis-Order.

So, how will this chaotic era evolve? My sense is that it will end in a climax that will defy most of the predictions being made.

Donald Trump is increasingly frenetic. Vladimir Putin is intransigent and cruel. Xi Jinping is seemingly cool, presiding without public rambunctiousness but with dictatorial authority over China’s vast strengths.

And Benjamin Netanyahu, the belligerent leader of a country of ten million people, has shown extraordinary skills at political survival and fomenting mayhem in his region — and, to a great extent, in the United States, certainly among American Jews.

My great fear is that this period will explode rather than subside. Trump and Putin both have nuclear arsenals, with arms treaties having expired. When their control is directly challenged, I worry that one or both will do something no longer unthinkable: prove that they can mount a nuclear strike as a demonstration of what can happen.

I imagine that there are still restraints on Trump, though when I hear Pete Hegseth’s bluster, I’m not so sure. But who will stop Putin from doing whatever he wants? Of all the great dangers in the world — Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Taiwan, et al. — the gravest is Vladimir Putin’s nuclear cache and his absolute power over it.

I am, by instinct and experience, not an alarmist. Declaring crises of all kinds — foreign (Vietnam and Iraq, for instance) and domestic (illegal immigration) — has a self-fulfilling tendency, and usually does not solve the problems before making them worse, one way or another.

I believe the current Trump-Putin do-si-do is an exceptional relationship. This is not Hitler and Mussolini, a cliché of repetitive history, but it certainly does rhyme.

Their assembled weaponries — strategic, tactical, and cyber — can destroy civilizations with far less use of conventional military power than in the past. I do not know what Xi Jinping would do if he thought matters were really getting out of control, but I can’t imagine he would not take whatever action he felt he needed to protect his interests.

Here’s where I try to calm down, at least to myself.

Threats to civilization have been around since the beginning of recorded time, and great civilizations have collapsed. Think of Greece and Rome, the Aztecs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs, the Soviets. To some extent the “clash of civilizations,” as Sam Huntington so vividly foresaw, is inevitable, but at least before the nuclear age civilizations could regroup and progress would continue to a better world.

Will that happen now, when multiple civilizations are clashing and empires are asserting their influences?

Sometimes, in the midst of our vast political challenges. small signs — spring’s green shoots — become apparent, showing that societies can make surprising, peaceful pivots.

From 1945 until 1989, the fate of Berlin was considered a potential trigger for nuclear superpower confrontation. But on that 1976 trip to East Berlin, I encountered something completely unexpected, which I wrote about in a “Letter from Berlin,” as follows:

“Most evenings after work, Heinz, a young shop foreman, and his wife, Ellie, an English teacher, settle down with beer and pretzels in front of their big television for several hours of cops-and-robbers (Kojak is popular), commercials and the latest news.

“What makes the routine surprising is that they live in East Germany, not far from the Berlin Wall, and the television they watch is three channels beamed every day from the West. Heinz, moreover, is a Communist Party member.”

I wrote that as much as 80 percent of East Germany was receiving West German television channels on ordinary sets, and even senior party officials conceded that the programs were widely watched.

My coverage of the Eurocommunist summit was on the front page. My Berlin letter was somewhere inside the newspaper. On reflection, I have concluded that the television story was the one that had the really significant lasting impact on how East Germany would evolve.

I wish I could cite similar indicators that forecast a less chaotic future because of the way most people want to go about their lives. At the moment, though, I don’t have any in mind.

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Jeff Bezos came to Washington last week and hosted at his mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood a four-hour meeting and lunch with the Washington Post’s (interim) CEO Jeff D’Onofrio, executive editor Matt Murray, and about thirty “executives, editorial leaders and journalists” for a presentation and discussion about the company.

The most detailed account of the occasion I found was in the Puck newsletter, behind a paywall, from which I will share what, to me, were the most relevant points. Attendees were not permitted to have their phones in the room and presumably chose not to publicly share what was said.

• Bezos made it clear that he wants to “save” the Post and has turned down seven offers to sell it.

• The layoffs of three hundred people from the news staff in February were based on results of data collected about what subscribers of the Post were reading. For example, readership of the sports section was judged not significant enough to be maintained.

• The data showed that the core of political and national security news and investigative reporting should be the Post’s focus and would be henceforth.

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Having watched the continuing tribulations of the Washington Post for more than two years, I have been thinking and consulting with Post alumni from its glorious past and others who might have ideas to share about a turnaround strategy that could restore the Post’s stature and financial viability.

What I have learned about the apparent plan for the Post partly reflects my thinking but is not nearly enough to resolve the crisis. Nor did what I heard in an interview with Murray on a Puck podcast just after the firings, the day before Bezos finally sacked the hapless CEO, Will Lewis, after he was spotted at a Super Bowl event in San Francisco.

Murray’s message was that with the layoffs, the “table had been set” for the Post’s recovery, which was apparently also Bezos’s message in the meeting last week.

So what would I argue is a different and better strategy? Let me start by saying with emphasis that this is THE WASHINGTON POST, the only major news organization based in the capital of the United States, where monumental decisions of global national consequence are made.

It is also (or was) far and away the most important news organization in a metropolitan area of roughly 6.5 million people — and what could be, with energy and innovation, a financial base again for a revived Post, as it was for so long in the past.

Recognizing the Post’s strengths and the limitations that have been revealed in the recent years of decline, this should become two news organizations, with subscription models for one or both.

Back to the Future

In its heyday, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, the Washington Post’s newsroom grew from about the size it is now, around five hundred people, to the larger numbers it was before this latest round of layoffs.

The Post had a formidable and eventually outstanding national and foreign staff, where I spent most of my eighteen years at the paper. The emergence of the Style section in the late 1960s was transformational, not just at the Post but also more widely in the world of journalism, because of its lively approach to feature coverage that was as readable as any in upscale magazines.

The Post also had a small but talented group of cultural critics, who were nationally known. Many won Pulitzer Prizes in their fields.

Over the years a common shorthand for newspapers of power and impact became “the Times and the Post,” as though they were virtually twins. (It has to be said that the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times resented being relegated to a second tier.)

In fact, those of us at the Post always knew that in many respects the New York Times was much bigger in scale and reach. New York was the cultural and financial capital of the country, which was reflected in the coverage of those subjects and the advertising base that they provided.

For all its stature and international reputation through its location in the capital and its joint publication with the Times of the International Herald Tribune, the Post was fundamentally a metropolitan paper with, by choice, virtually no national distribution.

The Times’s current dominance of sidelines such as puzzles and cooking has been longstanding. In the 1990s, when I was the publisher of Times Books at Random House, I (somewhat improbably) was responsible for a crossword and games franchise, which was one of the most reliably profitable pieces of the company.

We would occasionally slip in a Post crossword puzzle book.

Craig Claiborne’s writing about food for the Times was also enormously popular, as were his cookbooks.

Perhaps the greatest fallacy in this misbegotten era is that the Washington Post’s role is to compete with the New York Times — or anyone else, for that matter.

The Post should not try to match the Times, where it can’t do so and never has. At last count, the Times has 2,300 people in the news operation.

Instead, the Post should renew and expand its demonstrated expertise in politics, national security, international reporting, and investigative journalism, emphasizing depth and expertise. Breaking news is available everywhere. Murray has said that this is his intention. Good.

An interesting new model for global reporting in the digital age is Noosphere, the enterprise recently started by Jane Ferguson, who made her name at the PBS News Hour. She has assembled a group of experienced freelance correspondents in a number of places who provide video, podcast, photo, and text pieces that are distributed to subscribers.

Today’s generation of journalists have to be multifaceted, presenters as well as reporters.

A revived Style section should devote itself again to Washington in its current guise, where matters colorful, controversial, and bizarre are rampant. A Style signature was the publication of profiles of luminaries, with a captivatingly fresh voice. Today’s Washington is replete with likely subjects for portrayals of this kind.

How to attract the talent for these spirited coverage areas?

As I wrote months ago, most of the Post’s stars — the people who have left for other jobs or have recently been laid off — became stars through the work they did at the Post.

With a much-needed assurance of the owner’s support beyond what has been heard from Jeff Bezos so far, and a commitment to a determined outreach for possible hires and raising the morale of the many excellent reporters and editors still at the Post, the effect would soon become clear in this particularly turbulent era.

The Homecoming

The Washington Post’s other traditional great strength was its metro and sports coverage for what is known as the DMV — the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Politics, education, business, and other local topics, along with major sports franchises, connected the sprawling region.

This metropolitan area, with a prosperous and diverse population, should be served by a news organization with resources appropriate to its size and, significantly, its enormous commercial potential.

This metro version of the Post would restore local news and sports coverage. (Under the rubric of “for further reading,” the Post as a good neighbor could cross-promote with the smaller and upstart news organizations in the region.)

Ultimately in any business, fiscal success comes from earned revenue. My much-repeated mantra about the Post, quoting the late Katharine Graham, was that it was “Woodward & Bernstein and Woodward & Lothrop” (the downtown department store) — great journalism and abundant advertising that made it so profitable.

The Post, like all news organizations, now relies mainly on digital news delivery, and the belief is that advertising online cannot match in revenue what it had been in print.

But an imaginative and aggressive approach to metro advertising solicitation and presentation would enable businesses across the region to reach all potential customers, the way zones were designed for the print editions in the past.

Craigslist famously replaced classified advertising in newspapers. How about a Post version of Craigslist across all the categories that people now need to search from any number of sites? Local tech support is as important today as plumbers and electricians always have been. Paid obituaries seem to be lucrative.

The Post maintained its extensive metro circulation for so long by keeping the price of the daily paper artificially low, at a quarter or so. Today, the Post’s online subscription price is also kept low with offers and gimmicks.

Continue that policy — but develop a different pricing strategy for the national and international version of the daily report, whose readers generally expect subscription costs that are somewhat higher.

A word about the opinion section. The reaction to Jeff Bezos’s announcement in February 2025 about the restructuring of the section to conform to his views on liberty and trade was intense, resulting in mass cancellations.

In our online news universe, opinions come from every direction. Every point of view is easily available. That is an accepted reality. The Post should accept this as well.

The print paper is still distributed. I subscribe. It makes me sad. There is a front section of news, but everything else is, bluntly, pathetic: the remnants of sports, comics, and the classifieds come before a couple of pages of local news.

Digital first and foremost is inevitable. But if you want to continue with a niche print newspaper, make it feel worth the price. To get the New York Times, daily and Sunday, delivered to your door now costs about $1,000 annually.

If you want a print paper, be ready to pay for it.

“Back to the Future” and “Homecoming” may seem awfully retro. But consider this: the current trajectory for the Washington Post is oblivion.

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I always project myself to age eighty, but as I get older, I’m starting to do ninety — so I know that when I’m ninety. It’s going to be one of the things I’m most proud of, that I took on the Washington Post and helped it through a very rough transition.

— from Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (Harvard Business Review Press and PublicAffairs, 2020)

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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos Will Be Honorary Chairs of the Met Gala.

— The New York Times, February 23, 2026

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By now, everyone anywhere who could possibly care knows that Jeff Bezos is reducing the Washington Post to a remnant of what he bought and has owned for more than a decade. Explanations and theories of why he is doing this abound. The Post is losing money. Bezos is cultivating Donald Trump. Bezos wants Pentagon contracts for Blue Origin, his space passion. With his new wife and his own buff new looks, Bezos favors glamour over accountability.

The reality is that no one can really explain to me why Jeff Bezos has made this decision. I have asked the only people I know who might have an answer. Either they won’t say or their response is a chilling “He doesn’t care.” I find that hard to believe.

As a mogul who created Amazon from scratch decades ago, he must know that there are reputational aspects to business. Trashing a media icon is a guarantee of public vituperation. Combining it with the incessant self-portrayal of luxury living, which chairing the Met Gala symbolizes, is clueless and/or cruel, accompanied days later by the firing of hundreds of people at the Post and then the hapless CEO Will Lewis.

Bezos became executive chairman of Amazon’s board of directors in 2021, telling Amazon employees that the new position would give him the time and energy to “focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”

My connection to Bezos was his book, Invent and Wander, which I conceived and published — a project that he said pleased him and was profitable to all concerned. His $750,000 in royalties went, I was told, to the New Orleans Public Library system. We have not been in touch since.

So, how to explain what has happened to Jeff Bezos?

My explanation is essentially these factors:

In 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Scott, divorced after twenty-six years of marriage, with a financial settlement giving Scott 25 percent of his Amazon shares. In 2026, Bezos’s wealth is around $230 billion, about ten times what it was when he bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million.

Bezos’s affair with Lauren Sánchez went public in lurid detail in the National Enquirer immediately after he and Scott announced they would divorce. He was fifty-five years old. He married Sánchez in 2025 at a lavish wedding in Venice.

Whatever else Bezos had accomplished up to then, he plainly wanted a different style of life. He and the new Mrs. Bezos became fixtures at every conceivable venue of vast wealth, on his $500 million yacht, at new Gilded Age events around the globe, at the inauguration of Donald Trump to his second term.

By comparison, Bezos’s philanthropy received little attention, including his establishment in 2021 of the Courage and Civility Award, with $100 million each going to Van Jones, a lawyer, civic activist, and CNN contributor, and José Andrés, the chef and humanitarian, to distribute to charities and nonprofit organizations of their choice. Dolly Parton received $100 million, and the actress Eva Longoria and the retired admiral and bestselling author William McRaven received $50 million each, on similar terms.

After the Post achieved a major turnaround in scale and financial results, the situation there began to deteriorate. Marty Baron, the executive editor Bezos had inherited, who was credited with the enhancement of the Post’s journalistic achievements, retired. Bezos found a distant sinecure for the publisher, Frederick J. Ryan, who was deemed a failure in business and leadership terms.

Will Lewis, a British journalist with a background in the Murdoch publishing empire, was named publisher and CEO. Sally Buzbee, who had been hired from the Associated Press as Baron’s successor, resigned in an early dispute with Lewis. The simple summation is that matters steadily worsened from then on.

Instead of declarations of pride in the Post, Bezos said publicly he would “save” it a second time. He was quoted as calling the news organization a “complexifier” in his extensive professional and reinvented personal life.

Which brings me to the second factor in what has happened to the Post.

I think of it as the Michael Jordan metaphor. One of the greatest basketball players of all time was at best mediocre in baseball. Jeff Bezos is unquestionably one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American history. He has flailed in journalism because he demonstrably doesn’t understand how it is done — both in its role as an indispensable public asset and as a business.

And, from what little I have been able to find out in my efforts at excavating the Post debacle, Bezos is not prepared to listen and learn from people who could advise him on a now-essential transformation. His newly named interim publisher, Jeff D’Onofrio, joined the Post in 2025 after a career at the digital companies Raptive, Tumblr, and Google.

Matt Murray is the executive editor, and his view is that with the contraction in the newsroom the “table has been set” for the Post’s recovery. That will be the subject of my piece next week.

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On Sunday, April 17, 1960, a four-column headline at the top of the front page of the New York Times declared:

Knopf, Random House in Publishing Merger

Deal Made on Handshake Over Luncheon

— Cerf’s Company to Buy Stock, but Knopf Will Stay on Job

The byline on the story was Gay Talese, who amazingly in 2026 is still doing journalism of distinction.

This was clearly a big deal, although the sale price was about $3 million.

In fact, Random House had acquired Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf’s illustrious publishing company, which had been established in 1915. Bennett Cerf and his partner, Donald Klopfer, had founded Random House in the 1920s. Random House was itself a major book publisher, but with a bit less literary panache than Knopf.

In 2026, Penguin Random House, which still includes Knopf, is owned by Bertelsmann, a family company based in Gutersloh, Germany, and is the world’s largest book publisher, with billions in global revenues and solid profits.

What was a transaction small enough to be agreed over lunch was arguably the beginning of the modern corporate multi-billion-dollar business that book publishing has become. Whereas the media and technology companies are enormous business stories, book company finances are now mainly footnotes.

Gayle Feldman has recently published Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, a masterwork of biography and a history of the evolution of book publishing in the twentieth century that in narrative and meticulous detail reflects the two decades Feldman devoted to writing the book.

For my purposes, I want to focus on the question of what made Bennett Cerf a great publisher — and what that means in today’s era, in which more books than ever are being sold.

The portrait Feldman provides of Cerf is of a man who wanted to enjoy life (and succeeded) and who had the talent for choosing which books to publish and how to do that best.

From James Joyce’s Ulysses, the controversial book that gave the fledgling publisher an initial boost, until Cerf’s death in 1971, with Klopfer as his less colorful but rock-solid partner, an extraordinary outpouring of books of quality (mainly) and notice appeared.

There were authors whose fame endures, from Gertrude Stein to Ayn Rand and literary geniuses like William Faulkner, John O’Hara, and William Styron. Cerf’s nurturing of Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and James Michener provided Random House with a stream of vastly popular and profitable books long past his death.

There was a flip side to Bennett Cerf. He wrote bestselling joke books, which were published by other companies. He was a regular Sunday night panelist on the game show What’s My Line?, which made him a recognizable, national celebrity.

(His equally formidable and entrepreneurial wife, Phyllis, originated “Beginner Books,” which established Random House as a leading children’s book publisher — a market that was then and is now indispensable to its business success.)

Cerf didn’t just publish books, he made them into events, drawing comparisons to Broadway and Hollywood producers. There was zeal in every format and in the advertising, publicity, and relations with booksellers.

I spent a dozen years at Random House in the 1980s and ’90s, hired by Cerf’s successor, Robert L. Bernstein, also a publisher of flair, when the company was owned by S. I. Newhouse of the Conde Nast dynasty.

These were the years of increasing consolidation and corporate domination in book publishing, but the industry still could generate media fascination and headlines. I especially remember the day when on the front page of the Times it was reported that Joni Evans, the publisher of the Random House trade division (not the whole company), was being replaced by Harry Evans. (The two were not related.)

I chuckled at the notion of the New York Times editorial meeting that day: “Evans is out! Evans is in!”

The era when book publishing had that level of fascination and notoriety is definitively over. There are famous authors, but the publishers and editors responsible for them are rarely visible, except when they are caught up in scandals or takeovers, or when the legendary ones die.

So, what does it take to be a great book publisher in 2026? I recently spoke with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster, and in my view the closest comparison today to Bennett Cerf.

Jon started at Random House as an editorial assistant in 1989, earning $17,000 a year. Over time and with demonstrated skill he rose through the editorial ranks and was made CEO of Simon & Schuster following the death in 2020 of Carolyn Reidy, herself an exemplary book person.

What is the comparison to Cerf? In our conversation, Jon described every phase of his publishing career as “fun,” sharing stories of acquiring and wrangling books and coping with author egos and literary agents’ demands that others found stressful and even excruciating.

He took a brief detour working for Scott Rudin, a famously difficult film and theater producer (with whom he got along), although he quickly decided he preferred books. Jon also wrote a musical called How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes and had it staged off-Broadway in 2006.

Cerf imagined how to publish in a variety of ways. Aside from Beginner Books, there was a young-adult history series called Landmark (which as a boy I read assiduously) and other innovations.

In 2005, Jon devised what he called Twelve, a publishing imprint that would release and promote one book a month, as a way to focus closely on each title, in recognition that getting the public’s attention for books was growing more difficult.

And now, as he leaves the CEO position, he is launching Simon Six, with a similar concept. In 2026, it is even harder to reach readers than it was when reviews and advertising drove sales, unless you understand social media and fragmented audiences.

This is what I consider the most significant aspect of my Cerf-Karp comparison. A great book publisher also has to be a very savvy businessperson. Cerf dealt with RCA when it acquired Random House in 1966, and Karp contended with Paramount’s determination to sell Simon & Schuster and the failed merger with Penguin Random House, which collapsed after a protracted antitrust trial.

A publisher has also to be able to select books that will sell, mass as well as class, and across our political and cultural divide. That explains how S&S could publish Mike Pence and Kamala Harris and the enormously popular genre called “romantasy” — romance mixed with fantasy.

Bennett Cerf would never have heard of romantasy, but like Jon Karp he would have known what to do with it.

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This is how the decrepit tenement would look, restored with AI imagery.

With the assistance of a genealogist, I traced the branch of the Osnos family that lived at Twarda 28 to around 1740, when Jews in what was then the Russian empire, including large swaths of Poland and Ukraine, were mandated to add surnames to what had been only first names and patronymics, as in Ivan Ivanovich (which means “son of Ivan”).

The explanation provided was that individuals could now be added to tax rolls under a surname and thereby be available for the draft into the czar’s armed forces.

Osnos is an adaptation of an Old Testament name: Asenath, the wife of Joseph. The name is rendered in English in various spellings — Osnes, Osnoss, and so forth. We found Osnos families (with baptismal certificates) as far removed as Norway and Nebraska.

Over the years, I gathered fragmentary information from my father about his family. He expressed pride in their heritage, generations of university education and business prosperity.

Only now do I realize that he did not include their tragic demise. And I did not ask for more.

On a visit to Auschwitz in 2019, I encountered the scroll of names of people who were killed during the Holocaust, on which there are nineteen Osnos names. I now realize that this list certainly includes members of my father’s family, as enumerated on the headstone in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery.

I had known that my father’s brother Jakub, a doctor who lived at Twarda 28, became a Polish army officer at the start of the war and was murdered at Katyn Forest, the massacre of Poles carried out by the Soviets in the spring of 1940, while Stalin was still an ally of Hitler.

This was a particularly notorious and much-studied episode of the war.

After the Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed in June 1941, another brother (whose name I so far haven’t found) became a Red Army officer and survived the war, the only sibling aside from my father who did. I was told that he was exiled to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1948 and that my father had been able to reach him at some point, years ago.

In 1977, while I was in Moscow for the Washington Post, I received a telephone call at the office from a person who identified himself as my “cousin from Siberia” and who said his name was Piotr, Russian for Peter.

At the time, the Soviets had launched a campaign against Western journalists, and I was repeatedly identified in the press as a “secret agent of the United States,” allegedly working for the CIA. A call from a “relative” on an open phone line seemed unlikely, and for his sake, mainly, I said I had no cousins in Siberia.

In 2020, I tracked down a man named Vladimir Osnos in Moscow, who I was told was related to us. He was the son of one of Russia’s most celebrated chess masters. I asked him by email whether in the 1970s he had ever been contacted by “authorities” about me. His response was classically ambiguous: “I can say nothing about that.”

My father had a nephew in New York named Zarka. In an oral history he said he had made it out of Poland to New York because he spoke fluent German and “did not look” Jewish. There was doubtless much more to that story, but, frustratingly now, I never asked and he never offered.

Finally, my great aunt Bassya Osnos married Nachman Syrkin, a leader in Socialist Zionism, of sufficient stature for Israel to name a naval vessel after him. When Bassya died at thirty-eight, Nachman, who was living in New York, went to Warsaw and married her younger sister Machette. Nachman’s daughter, Marie Syrkin, had an illustrious U.S. career as a writer, professor, and biographer of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.

All these details amount only to clues about the Osnos family. I would have known much more had I asked or if my father had not been so focused on his full life in the United States. After my mother died and he was nearing ninety, he would talk to my wife, Susan, a bit about the past. By then the details tended to be confused.

Readers: While it is possible, get as much as possible about your background. It helps to explain your own life and character, and for second- and third-generation offspring of immigrants or refugees it can be of great interest and benefit.

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Twarda 28 in the early months of the war was something of a sanctuary for my mother and brother, in particular. My father had left Warsaw, initially to join a military contingent; when that became impossible, he made his way to Bucharest, where he succeeded in arranging a way for his wife and son to escape Poland.

As described by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier in In the Garden of Memory: “In June 1940 Robert Osnos and his mother left Poland. . . . Very few people managed to get out of Warsaw so late in the day in the day; it is a miracle that they succeeded. To bring it off, two superhuman powers combined forces: his father’s and his mother’s.”

It was at Twarda 28 where much of the miracle unfolded. There are three sources for what happened. One is Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s book. The others were memoirs written by my mother, Marta, and my brother, Robert, describing the months in Warsaw after the war started and how they finally escaped. The full versions can be downloaded at the “virtual attic” of anespeciallygoodview.com, in the memoirs section.

Robert attributes his memories to the personalities of his parents: “Optimistic, very strong willed, amazingly competent, and resourceful. That is why I could write this, rather than being buried in Auschwitz. . . . As far as I know they were pillars of integrity.”

At Twarda 28, Marta wrote, people from elsewhere in the building moved into the ground-floor apartments, thought to be the safest, “so they would slowly move down, bringing pillows, covers, food, and advice. In a way it was good for Robert. He has children to play with all day long. . . .

“The last 24 hours before surrender, we spent all 18 people in a small bathroom in the middle of the apartment. Somebody had a pocket full of raisins, so from time to time, we nibbled some.”

With the immigration papers my father had managed to obtain in Bucharest, and my mother’s conversion to Catholicism in order to be able to travel, Marta and Robert left Warsaw on June 9. My father greeted them in Bucharest with roses.

Those in the Osnos family who did not leave were the ones whose names are engraved on the headstone and who are listed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as victims of the Shoah.

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When the boundaries of the Small Ghetto were drawn in 1940, after Marta and Robert had left Warsaw, Twarda 28 was included. Conditions in the ghetto have been collected in great detail. In the 1970s Marta herself was the translator of the major study of hunger disease carried out by Jewish physicians about conditions in the ghetto.

The study’s leader, Dr. Israel Milejkowski, wrote that the symptoms of hunger “consisted of crowds of beggars and corpses often lying on the street covered with newspapers.”

Somehow after the war, Twarda 28 was refurbished and once again became an apartment building. Professor Jakub Lewicki’s account reports that in the 1960s it was taken over by the State Treasury, and a general renovation was carried out, removing the decorative elements of the building’s exterior — which explains why the building now is so grim an apparition in downtown Warsaw.

A news story in the spring of 2025 reported that the district including Twarda 28 had submitted documentation to Warsaw’s Office of City Property and to the State Treasury about preparing the building for sale. The district “argues that private investors have funds for renovations, which local governments do not. It is worth emphasizing that the new buyer of the building will be obligated to maintain it in accordance with the guidelines of the historic preservation officer, and if they decide to remodel or add to it, they will do so in consultation with the preservation officer.”

So, once again Twarda 28 will escape destruction, if a sale happens and the buyer has an interest in Warsaw’s Jewish history.

The history of the building and the family that owned it, or those few that survived the war, is a tribute to their resilience against enormous odds.

An abandoned building is their legacy.

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The all-white Museum of Modern Art . . . gleaming beside the hulking Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science. . . . For decades, the Polish capital has been seen as pragmatic rather than magnetic . . . it demands to be seen anew.

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This building, close to the museum and the palace in the center of Warsaw, is called the Leib Osnos Tenement. In the process of publishing In the Garden of Memory about my mother’s family, I began to learn more about my father’s family, who had built it in the early years of the twentieth century. There were fifty apartments, eleven stores on the ground floor, and a doctor’s office.

I found out that it was the only building in what was known as the “small ghetto” that remained standing after the end of World War II. And in 2019 it was included in the official Registry of Objects of Cultural Heritage, protecting it from being demolished.

I assembled a history of the building and the family that owned it, including the discovery that my grandmother Rachela Olga Osnos did not die before the war, as I had always believed. She died in the ghetto or in a concentration camp, as did so many others in the family.

Their fates were not really a secret. But except for the gravestone my father had erected in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery decades after the war, the subject was never discussed in any detail by my parents, and I never asked for more. Here is what the gravestone says:

LIEB OSNOS

CITIZEN OF WARSAW

LIVED 67 YEARS

DIED 20.VII.1939

RACHELA OLGA OSNOS

CHILDREN

JAKUB MARIA ANNA

MAREK FRYDA

GRANDSONS AND GRANDDAUGHTERS

DIED

A MARTYR’S DEATH

MURDERED BY

NAZI BARBARIANS

1940-1944

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The building is badly in need of renovation, shuttered completely and adorned with graffiti, with bits of plaster falling on passersby. No funds have been available to get this work started.

I had only been vaguely aware of the building. In family papers, there was correspondence in which my father was approached by lawyers in the 1960s, urging him to seek some compensation for the state seizure. That did not happen.

Against all odds, the building was not destroyed by bombings in 1939 as the Nazis occupied Poland or by the continued barrage of attacks as the war progressed. In the severe housing shortage in Warsaw after the war, it was resettled by tenants. The last residents left in 2009 because the building was no longer safe.

Controversies surrounded what had become a decrepit concrete eyesore until it was registered as a monument by the authorities as a vestige of pre-war Warsaw and the thriving Jewish community that had been virtually annihilated.

On a visit to Poland in the spring of 2025, I mentioned to the concierge at the Hotel Europejski, itself an elegantly refurbished remnant of pre-war café society, that I was planning to visit Twarda 28, showing him a photograph that I had found in, of all places, a Wikipedia entry.

Startled and clearly impressed, he called over a colleague and exclaimed that I was of the Lieb Osnos family. That was when I realized that while this structure may be shabby and uninhabitable, it was symbolically significant. I decided to find every shred of information I could about what it was like when my father’s family owned it.

I was shocked to realize for the first time that my grandmother and most of my aunts and uncles had disappeared after the war started and were Holocaust victims. Because in my mother’s family everyone had managed to survive, I chose to think that my close relatives had been exceptions to the greater catastrophe.

My father, Josef, as formidable in his way as the family building, never reflected on the tragedies, leaving only the symbolic gravestone in a prominent place at the front of Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery.

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Over the years, Polish publications have written about the building’s history, reporting on its symbolic importance and/or complaining that it is now a blight in the midst of skyscrapers and high-end retail.

The most detailed description was provided by Urbex Travel, a website run by a couple who describe their “passion” as visiting “abandoned places . . . houses, mansions, warehouses, factories and many others.” Their portfolio of interior photographs shows that the apartments were spacious and ornamental, homes for families with the means to live in comfort.

Quoting from a book called Roots of the City: “In 1936, the building generated over 5000 zlotys in rental income. The owner charged 180 zlotys for a four-room apartment, with a kitchen and bathroom, and 19 zlotys for a single room apartment in the basement. The ground floor housed numerous shops, a butcher shop, a dairy shop, a hairdresser’s salon, and a wine shop.” A document written after the war by a lawyer in Canada who had represented Lieb Osnos reported that there were fifty apartments in the building and eleven stores on the ground level.

The doctor’s office and apartment belonged to my father’s oldest brother, which my mother described in her memoir of that period as “beautifully furnished.” Of particular note,” she wrote, there were “green velvet chairs” in the dining room. The premises were on the first floor, which meant that they were a relatively safe place during the Nazi bombing in 1939.

Urbex’s account says the building was a “center of Jewish life and business, and everything was owned by Lieb Osnos,” who had made an apparently prosperous living by “trading textiles.” This had enabled him in around 1910 to buy the land and develop the property.

The technical description of the building from Urbex said it had “architectural features typical of a 19th century tenement house,” which in modern terms indicates that it was not a single-family mansion but rather the residence of a successful upper-middle-class businessman and his family.

A report by Professor Jakub Lewicki, the Mazovian Voivodeship (the Warsaw district) Conservator of Monuments, calls the building a “priceless relic of its heyday . . . a valuable document of the history of old Warsaw, particularly the history of the Jewish community and the ongoing stylistic and formal transformations, which are clearly visible within the confines of a single building.”

Lewicki wrote: “Despite the damage sustained during World War II . . . the building possesses significant artistic value . . . particularly noteworthy are the exceptionally rich stucco decoration and the introduction of parquet flooring in most rooms . . . and above all the entrance doors and joinery inside the apartments.”

The windows have been shuttered with concrete. Of course, I was moved to see it as an uncanny connection to my ancestors, but to other passersby it would be just another glimpse of a world that had been destroyed between 1939 and 1945.

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Before the holidays, we happened to be driving by the Kennedy Center in Washington with our grandsons, Ben, twenty-one, and Pete, twenty, the morning that a crew added Donald Trump’s name to the building.

l sensed that this close-up look at the Trump presidency could be as memorable to them as images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was for their grandparents so long ago.

Then, days after Trump’s rebranding of the nation’s memorial performing arts center, Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died of leukemia at thirty-five. The message Trump chose to share on Truth Social was: “The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys.”

By now we should be attuned to the scale of Trump’s multiple obsessions and stunning insults. Once in possession of the Kennedy Center, he ordered it closed for construction under his direction and presumably to his taste. Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize so badly that he eagerly accepted someone else’s prize and then told the prime minister of Norway that he would seize Greenland because he had deserved the prize. In his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he confused Greenland and Iceland.

And his press secretary insisted that, despite video evidence, he had not been confused. Claiming the prize, the Greenland demands, denying irrefutable video of what he had said — it’s all bonkers.

Did anyone vote for Trump to take Greenland or so that he could get the Nobel Peace Prize?

Having Trump’s name emblazoned everywhere has been a long-standing fixation. The shimmering Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan was built in 1983, followed by additional high-rises in New York and casinos in Atlantic City. Then he started licensing his name around the world, including to buildings he did not build.

Placing your name on edifices and a range of other things because you paid for them or squeezed the recipients into awarding the distinction has always been a function of some deep-rooted, primordial need for recognition in your lifetime.

By his own personal designation, and in amassing things with his name enshrined where he could bask in the glory, Trump is the all-around GOAT (“greatest of all time”).

In recent years, others in our gilded age have been similarly prodigious in having their names attached to their philanthropy and activities as they were launched. I have noticed two in particular.

David M. Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a major asset manager, is an American history buff, and he has made significant contributions to preserving our heritage. Thank you.

He is also omnipresent by name as the chair of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Kennedy Center — the latter before Trump ousted him and took the position for himself. Although not a natural media presence, he hosts interview programs on C-SPAN, PBS, CNN, and Bloomberg, and in leading public venues in New York and Washington — always with the imprimatur of David M. Rubenstein.

Repeat the same word over and over, and after a while it sounds silly. The same with names.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, is another billionaire and serial brander of his many activities, buildings, and programs. His penchant for naming glory does not guarantee admiration from people he doubtless would like to impress.

Some years ago, Paul Volcker, the great former chair of the Federal Reserve, was invited to the grand Fifth Avenue home of the New York Public Library to talk about his new memoir in its largest venue. He declined.

“I don’t go into the Schwarzman building” (which is what the NYPL building is now called), he told me, his publisher, when I informed him of the offer.

Excessive glorification can become self-parody, raising the question of why it is so ardently pursued by rich notables in their lifetimes, rather than postmortem, as was generally the case in the past. Is it vanity, insecurity, vulgarity? It could well be all three.

As regards the president, the Washington Post is keeping track. Aside from the Trump imprimaturs already adopted, there is the projected class of Trump battleships and a Trump fighter jet called the F-47, for the number of his presidency.

And these being bruited: A Washington NFL stadium, a triumphal arch on the National Mall, the grandiose White House ballroom, and, it has been reported, the rebranding of Dulles Airport and the people movers there to be called “Direct Jet Transports” — DJT, get it? Just this past week, Trump tried to pressure Senator Chuck Schumer to rename Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after himself, as a condition for freeing up federal funding for a rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey.

The coming question is what happens after he is, one way or another, gone from the scene. Whose role will it be to rename so many artifacts of his era? Can the names be resold, as happened when Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center’s main concert hall, became David Geffen Hall in exchange for a donation of $100 million?

Names can also lose luster as selling tools. When Trump was still a developer, he bought up industrial lands and abandoned railyards on Manhattan’s West Side along the Hudson River and erected a string of high-rise apartment buildings that dominated that stretch of skyline.

The buildings had Trump-style accoutrements, including his name. After Trump became president, condo owners and tenants removed the nomenclature. What was known as Trump Place is now a series of numbered buildings on Riverside Boulevard.

Trump had intended to put up the world’s tallest building there. That did not happen. The swankiest residential, office, and retail area on the West Side now is further to the south. It is called Hudson Yards, named for the majestic river discovered by the explorer Henry Hudson more than four centuries ago.

And there is a stretch of the West Side Highway along much of this same route, which is named after another icon closely identified with New York, Joe DiMaggio, an honor justly bestowed after his death.

Naming rights that are legitimate honors should be awarded, rather than solicited, demanded, or just outright paid for.

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I should explain that this Substack is branded with my name as a condition of its being called Public Affairs Press, to distinguish it from the publishing imprint I founded, which is now owned by Hachette and is still called PublicAffairs.

Used appropriately, I am in favor of names as signifiers, not as cockeyed displays of self-anointed eminence.

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Tonight, a short reprise: a reprise of how we approached the challenge and thanks to all of you who helped along the way.

The Port Authority is a storied, century-old institution that was built to do hard things across borders, across rivers, and across political cycles.

History

Just in its first decade alone, it built three iconic bridges and an astonishing tunnel under the Hudson River, all still in use today.

Over time the agency’s portfolio expanded to include the Region’s airports, the four bridges and two tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey, the world’s busiest bus terminal, the second largest Seaport in the US, the PATH commuter railroad, and the 16-acre World Trade Center campus that has become a gem of lower Manhattan.

But somewhere along the way, the Port Authority began to falter and lose the public’s trust.

Scandal hijacked the agency’s mission. Controversies and disagreements started to dominate the agenda. Crisis intervened in the form of the 1993 bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attack. Time, resources, and focus rightfully shifted to rebuilding the World Trade Center. Development stagnated and projects stalled.

Think back just a decade ago.

The Midtown Bus Terminal was an embarrassing eyesore in the heart of Midtown Manhattan with no plan to rebuild it or even where to start.

All three major airports were consistently ranked at the bottom of every single passenger satisfaction survey. They were regularly mocked by the media, comedians, and even a Vice President.

The Port Authority had become synonymous with dysfunction and gridlock.

The World Passes Us

In contrast, places like Shanghai or Dubai and other Asian and European cities became symbols of best-in-class, efficient transit hubs – especially their airports, which stood as shining, welcoming beacons.

In contrast, the Port Authority had been written off. The public did not believe that the agency could deliver the best-in-class infrastructure needed to compete with the great cities of the world.

New Leadership

Thankfully, the region was fortunate to have leaders emerge who believed in a strong infrastructure agenda.

Leaders like Governor Kathy Hochul, who has kept me on as Executive Director when she became governor; Governor Andrew Cuomo, who appointed me originally and introduced me to the infrastructure industry; and Governor Phil Murphy, who provided essential support.

And Governor, knowing that you delivered your State of the State speech yesterday and the demands on you surrounding that event, I want to say that I am particularly grateful for your being here tonight.

And a key part of the turnaround story was that, the same day I was nominated to serve as Executive Director, Kevin O’Toole was selected by the Governor of New Jersey to chair the Port Authority’s Board of Commissioners.

In what was frankly an extraordinary break with the past, Kevin and I formed a true and uniquely fruitful partnership that focused on getting things done in service of our region and ending the agency’s paralyzing conflicts and dysfunction.

New Standards

World class

The next step towards change was to insist that the agency embrace and publicly commit itself to a new quality standard – that standard was to be best in class, best in the world.

No matter how difficult and no matter how distant that goal might have felt when Kevin and I first took office, we were intent on applying this standard across the agency, including not only our employees, but also our partners, contractors, and consultants.

True believers were few and far between back then when we started, including I suspect, many if not most of you here this evening.

Action not words or promises

We had to also drive home a harsh lesson to the agency – particularly in public service, there is no credit for effort, planning, or promises.

There is only credit for results.

There is only credit when something is built, completed, and put into service in the real world.

And best in the world meant new approaches

Taking risks and doing things differently – all in the interest of achieving results better or faster – needed to be the order of the day.

The phrase “But we’ve always done it that way,” needed to be banished from the agency’s vocabulary.

That empowered the agency to operate differently. Integrity was non-negotiable.

What did that mean in practice?

Public private partnerships

We focused on the scale and role of public-private partnerships across our ambitious agenda. Without these partnerships, we would not have been able to achieve the true best-in-class transformation we are making at the airports and at the Seaport.

Five different large-scale public-private partnerships at the airports enabled us to leverage tens of billions of dollars of private financing – a scale never seen before – and without which the scale of our $50 billion dollar airport redevelopment program would never have been possible.

It’s not just about the money they brought to the table – they also brought expertise. We have been able to draw on the skills and knowledge of these private companies. They, in areas like customer service, have experience and capabilities that are not the bread and butter of government agencies.

At the seaport, we focused on restructuring our marine terminal leases with the private operators who run our public port facilities. These new unprecedented lease arrangements tied long-term leases to higher performance expectations, more favorable revenue sharing, higher capital investment, and shared responsibility for keeping the system competitive.

During Covid, our Port became the second busiest seaport in the nation and outperformed virtually all of the ports in the nation in avoiding congestion. Our new lease provisions put us on an ambitious path to even higher standards and are setting the gold standard around the country and around the world.

Elevated focus on customer experience

We also focused on the experience of the customers and the travelers that we serve, and the airports are probably the most visible and relatable example to most of you in this room.

They are a prime example of our new playbook, which is now our standard practice, with results that showed what achieving best-in-class meant in the real world.

We made customer experience a daily test and constantly asked ourselves – does this best serve the public?

The answer meant demanding excellence in the big things — dramatic, appealing design and architecture: bright natural light, floor-to-ceiling windows, inspiring views of the airfield, the city skyline, or the waterfront.

We focused on creating a signature “sense of place” -- meaning New York and New Jersey -- at each of our new airports that reflected the character of the region.
We focused on putting public art front and center – commissioning respected local and international artists to create New York– and New Jersey–themed artworks that energize and delight travelers.

We elevated another key element of the customer experience, which is the level and variety of the concessions – food, beverage, and retail – again with major participation by local New York and New Jersey shops and brands.

Serving the public also meant obsessing over the small things that shaped customer experience and perception. It meant bright, spacious bathrooms — not the dingy, stainless-steel prison-style facilities of decades past.

And it meant elevators and escalators that actually worked and are consistently monitored remotely with maintenance crews on call 24/7.

Because those are the things people remember, and the clearest proof to the public that the traveler comes first.

We backed these changes with measurement: credible third-party surveys, real tracking of wait times, coupled with serious work to identify and focus on addressing other pain points.

Keep facilities open during construction

Given their role as gateways to the region, we had to keep LaGuardia open and are keeping Kennedy and Newark Liberty open and operating while rebuilding them. This is an extraordinary feat of engineering and planning.

We acknowledged that short-term disruptions would be difficult for our customers but continually reminded them that they would ultimately be rewarded with major long-term benefits.

Safety, security and sustainability

Across our facilities, we raised standards around safety and security. We raised the headcount of the Port Authority Police Department to its highest level in history and, with our federal partners, we embraced every cutting-edge security technology we could find.

We treated sustainability and innovation as fundamental responsibilities that should be baked into our redevelopment projects from the outset, not future aspirations with distant implementation dates.

We recognize climate change is an existential threat. We design to the highest resiliency standards in the business to protect against seawater rise, higher storm surges, and intensified storms. We have one of the largest solar and renewable programs in the business. We remain intensely focused on converting our fleet vehicles to electric.

To put it plainly: we are committed to being Net Zero by 2050. And, I’ll add, we just hit our 2025 greenhouse gas reduction target of 50 percent.

Concern for Community

In today’s world, in order to succeed, large infrastructure projects simply must have significant support from the surrounding community. Too often in the past, the Port Authority was perceived as arrogant and unengaged.

So, we set out to change that: we showed up, engaged with the communities where our facilities operate, and delivered tangible benefits in return.

At our airports, for example, we delivered record-setting levels of contracts and business opportunities to local, small, and diverse businesses. Specifically, these record-setting efforts delivered: $2.3 billion of contracts to minority-and-women-owned businesses at LaGuardia and a staggering $3 billion of such contracts at Kennedy.

And beyond the airports, the $11 billion transformation of the Midtown Bus Terminal that is now finally underway may be the clearest example of what it means to listen to and work with the community.

Originally, the reaction to our plan from the community and the city for our initial design was…I think the technical term is…”no fucking way.”

Criticism focused on a lack of attention to getting idling buses off city streets and the omission of sufficient street-level amenities and green space that would contribute to the revitalization of the surrounding Hell’s Kitchen community.

So, we listened. We held hundreds of meetings. We assessed the feedback. And we decided the community comments were right and we methodically changed the design. Dramatically!

The result was nothing short of astonishing.

After being mired in community controversy and deadlock for decades, our new plan won the support not only of the local community board – a major feat in and of itself – but also of every elected official (many of whom are here tonight) whose districts encompassed the project – from City Council member all the way to its congressional representative.

This 10-year, multi-billion project, in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world, broke ground seven months ago and is now at long last moving forward.

It showed our new approach was working.

Results and awards

Port Authority employees began to take pride in delivering best-in-class, and soon that standard became a habit.

What once seemed impossible became simply the next thing to do.
Through the hard work of our re-energized team, and our partnership with the private sector, the Port Authority actually transformed LaGuardia from America’s worst to best, literally.

Ten years ago, LaGuardia was a punchline. Fast forward, LaGuardia has won almost every award in the book, including the Forbes Travel Guide having now named LaGuardia the Best Airport in the United States for two years in a row. And that designation was based off of the feedback of five thousand frequent flyers and travel experts

And if anyone thought that LaGuardia was a fluke, we immediately moved on to produce those same best-in-class results at Newark Liberty Terminal A when it opened, which was recognized as the best new airport terminal in the world by SkyTrax, the leading airport rating organization.

And finally BOTH LaGuardia and Newark Liberty Terminal A subsequently earned Skytrax’s highest award, its coveted five-star rating. In the entire United States, only three airports have facilities with five-star ratings – and two of them are the Port Authority’s. That’s never happened before. That’s best-in-class.

And we’re not stopping. Like I said, what once seemed impossible becomes simply the next thing we do.

We’re bringing best-in-class to the transformation of Kennedy, to a brand-new Newark Liberty Terminal B, and with the agency’s newly approved capital plan – our 10-year financial roadmap – we’ve set the stage for another decade of transformation across the agency.

These are not just construction projects.

They are statements.

Statements that public institutions, when led with conviction and integrity, can deliver generational change.

Statements that the Port Authority can deliver best-in-class results time and time again, which is what the people of our region deserve.

Today, the agency is once again delivering some of the most consequential infrastructure projects in the world.

As I pass the Executive Director responsibility to the extraordinary Kathryn Garcia, I know the Port Authority will keep boldly pushing forward.

Thank you to ABNY for this evening and your partnership over these years. Thank you to the business and political leaders and elected and civic advocates here who supported our important work.

And, of course, thank you to my family for their love and support, and especially thank you to Betsy, with whom I enjoy the very best version of a public-private partnership.

Our region, and our Port Authority, are both thriving. And the best is yet to come. Thank you.