Ron Suskind
Ronald Steven Suskind is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker. He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000, where he won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for articles that became the starting point for his first book, A Hope in the Unseen. His other books include The Price of Loyalty, The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World, Confidence Men, and his memoir Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, from which he made an Emmy Award-winning, Academy Award-nominated feature documentary. Suskind has written about the George W. Bush administration, the Barack Obama administration, and related issues of the United States' use of power.
Life and career
Suskind was born in Kingston, New York, to a Jewish family. He is the son of Shirley Berney and Walter B. Suskind, and a second cousin of producer David Susskind. He grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and graduated from Concord High School, after which he attended the University of Virginia. In 1983 he received a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.In 1990, Suskind went to The Wall Street Journal, and became senior national affairs reporter in 1993. In 1995, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for two articles on Cedric Jennings, a student at inner-city Ballou High School in Washington, D.C., who wanted to attend MIT. Suskind left the Journal in 2000.
Suskind has written six books, and he has published in such periodicals as Esquire and The New York Times Magazine. In 2004, he discussed his book The Price of Loyalty on CBS's 60 Minutes. In 2006 he discussed The One Percent Doctrine on The Colbert Report, and in 2008 he discussed The Way of the World on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and again appeared on the show when his 2011 book, Confidence Men, was published. He has also appeared on NBC's Today Show, ABC's Nightline and PBS's Charlie Rose. In 2001 and 2002, he was a contributor to "Life 360," a joint production of ABC and PBS. Between 2004 and 2008, he made appearances on Frontline, the PBS series. On May 13, 2014, he appeared on The Daily Show to discuss his book Life, Animated, the real-life story of his autistic son, Owen Suskind, and "his irrepressible wife," Cornelia.
In the spring of 2012, Suskind was the A.M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. At the Shorenstein Center he conducted four workshops for students about the process of reporting and writing titled, "Truth and Consequences: Crafting Powerful Narratives in the Age of Message."
Suskind has two sons with his wife, Cornelia Anne Kennedy Suskind. The couple married in 1988. Cornelia is the granddaughter of Democratic Representative Martin J. Kennedy.
Articles
In 2002, Suskind wrote two articles in Esquire on the workings of the George W. Bush White House. The first article, in June 2002, focused on presidential adviser Karen Hughes. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said that the pragmatic Hughes was "the beauty to Karl's beast", referring to Bush's advisor Karl Rove. According to Card, her resignation signified a political shift in the administration further to the right. Suskind's second Esquire story about Rove, in December 2002, carried the comments and a long memo from Bush's former head of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community initiatives John DiIulio, an official who left the White House and spoke about his experiences. DiIulio criticized the Bush administration for having "no policy apparatus" and fixating on political calculation, and was quoted as saying "it's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis," a comment he then explained in a 3,000-word, on-the-record memo to Suskind about his time in the administration. DiIulio later attempted to recant some of his characterizations.An October 2004 cover story by Suskind in the New York Times Magazine stated that the president was planning to partially privatize Social Security as his first initiative if re-elected—a disclosure that prompted controversy in the final two weeks of the campaign. In the article, Suskind quoted an unnamed advisor to Bush as saying that
Books
''A Hope in the Unseen''
In 1995 Suskind wrote a series of articles on the struggles of inner-city honors students in Washington, D.C, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Parts of these articles were used in his first book, A Hope in the Unseen. The story chronicles the two-year journey of Cedric L. Jennings, an honor student who aspires to escape his blighted D.C. upbringing by going to an Ivy League university.The book was chosen by The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Monthly and Booklist as one of the best books of the year. The New York Times Book Review called it an "extraordinary, formula-shattering book". David Halberstam called it a "beautiful book of a heroic American struggle." The book has been a selection in college courses on American culture, education, sociology and creative writing, and has been a required reading for incoming freshmen at some universities. In 2008, the book was selected as part of the "One Maryland, One Book" program.
In a review of the book, CNN declared: "As more voters, politicos and talk-show hosts write off affirmative action as a well-intentioned anachronism, A Hope in the Unseen should be required reading for would-be opinion-mongers." In his review for Newsday, Bill Reel stated "I changed my thinking about affirmative action. I was against it, now I am for it. The agent of change was a mind-opening book—A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind."
The book has been a favorite of Bill Clinton and school reformer Michelle Rhee, and Barack Obama.
Suskind says his writing style for this book was to use exhaustive reporting to place readers inside the heads of characters. Suskind stated that this "writing style" was a delving into motive and intent in an effort to understand the "good enough reasons" that underlie actions, which allowed for a fuller, more accurate—and often emotionally powerful—rendering of characters. The Chicago Tribune called the book "the new, new nonfiction."
''The Price of Loyalty''
The Price of Loyalty was published on January 13, 2004. The book, which chronicled the two-year tenure of United States Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, was about the conduct and character of the Bush presidency. While the book covered a number of foreign and domestic issues, it is focussed on events that culminated in the Iraq War.Among the disclosures in the book, which drew from numerous sources and more than 19,000 internal government documents, one was that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupation of Iraq was planned from Bush's first U.S. National Security Council meeting in January 2001, soon after Bush took office. This lay in contrast to the perception that concerns over Iraq came to the forefront after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Administration officials have contended that O'Neill confused contingency plans with actual plans for invasion.
Rather than denying his allegations, Bush officials attacked O'Neill's credibility, while answering that regime change in Iraq had been official U.S. policy since 1998, three years before Bush took office. However, O'Neill's claims called into question the relationship of the Iraq occupation to the post-9/11 war on terrorism. After the cover sheet of a packet containing classified information was shown during a 60 Minutes interview of O'Neill and Suskind, the United States Department of Treasury investigated whether both men had improperly received classified materials. It concluded in March 2004 that no laws were violated, but that inadequate document handling policies at the Treasury had allowed 140 documents which should have been marked classified to be entered into a computer system for unclassified documents. The documents were among those subsequently released to O'Neill in response to a legal document request and then given to Suskind.
In domestic affairs, the statements by O'Neill about the administration's allegedly chaotic and politically driven policy-making process supported the claims of John DiIulio. O'Neill stated that Vice President Cheney had become part of "a co-presidency" with George W. Bush. One of the book's disclosures involved the conflict between O'Neill and Cheney over what would become the 2003 tax cut. O'Neill, in a November 2002 meeting with Cheney and other senior officials, said that it was unprecedented to cut taxes at a time of war and that the cuts—which included the wealthiest Americans—would eventually push the government toward "fiscal crisis." Cheney's response was, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." O'Neill opposed this policy.
''The One Percent Doctrine''
The One Percent Doctrine is Suskind's third book, published in 2006. The book is about the evolution of the foreign policy of the younger Bush's administration especially in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Excerpts of book were published in the June 18, 2006, issue of Time. Based on interviews with more than a hundred sources, including several cabinet officials, the book concluded that U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 was driven by the Bush Doctrine, which is described by a quote from Vice President Dick Cheney saying that it was important for the U.S. to think of "low probability, high impact events"—like terrorists or rogue states getting their hands on WMD—"in a new way."The doctrine, Suskind asserts, freed the administration from the dictates of evidence and allowed suspicion to be a guide for action in both its battles against terrorists and against rogue states, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
One of Suskind's assertions—that a suspect in the London subway bombings was on a US "no fly" list and attempted to enter the US—has been challenged by the US government. The FBI described Suskind's reporting on this single matter as "inaccurate", and issued a statement saying "the author has intertwined facts... causing some confusion."
Despite being vetted by the CIA prior to publication, the book contained enough information to identify Aimen Dean, a mole within al Qaeda who had spent seven and a half years working for MI6 and had proven one of their most valuable assets. He was forced to quit his role and go into hiding, after extremists issued a Fatwa calling for his death. This act has been called ill advised and selfish by many in the intelligence community and the media.
The book was a New York Times Bestseller. Frank Rich called it a "must-read bestseller" while Michael Hill stated: "If Bob Woodward is the chronicler of the Bush administration, Ron Suskind is the analyst... Historians will be grateful for it as they write the many final drafts in the decades to come."