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Transcript: Trump Hit by Damning Iran Leaks as Polls Turn Brutal Fast
New Republic • 1 week ago

Transcript: Trump Hit by Damning Iran Leaks as Polls Turn Brutal Fast

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump’s rationale for waging war on Iran is coming under withering scrutiny. A new report in The New York Times shows that his deliberations were even more chaotic and unserious than we knew. This comes as the first round of polling has been brutal for Trump, showing shockingly low public support for his war. This looks very different from how initial debates over war typically unfold. What explains it? Mark Jacob has a good piece on his Substack, “Stop the Presses,” that links together Trump’s lawbreaking on multiple fronts. We’re going to talk about whether this already entrenched sense of Trump as a mad king is what’s turning the public against his war. Mark, good to have you on.Mark Jacob: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So the Times has a new exposé laying out how Trump decided to go to war, and boy is it damning. It shows that Trump lurched between saying he wants to reach a deal with Iran on nuclear weapons on one side, and saying he wants to overthrow its regime on the other. It all shows his case for war rested on lies about Iran as an imminent threat. And Trump publicly misrepresented what his own top general told him. Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine told Trump that a war risks significant American casualties. But Trump said Caine believed war with Iran would be “easily won.” Mark, what do you make of all that?Jacob: I think what we’re seeing is 11-year-olds with the most powerful military in the entire world, which is a pretty scary thing to see in action. And also, doesn’t it really look, from the New York Times reporting at least, like Netanyahu just bulldozed Trump into this? That he said, Well, we’re going and you’re going to get blamed for it anyway, so come with us and do it together. Which is no way for the supposedly most powerful country in the world to behave on the international stage. Netanyahu is just in a position where he’s going to get as much leverage over Trump and as much influence over Trump as possible. And Trump, being really kind of a child about foreign policy, is just going to be easily swayed.Sargent: It looks like that’s exactly what happened. Now, as of now, four Americans have been killed and a number of others have been seriously injured. The Supreme Leader of Iran has also been killed, but Trump is now saying military action will escalate. We just had a new CNN poll finding 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s action against Iran versus only 41 percent who approve. 59 percent say they don’t trust Trump to make good decisions here, and 60 percent say he doesn’t have a clear plan for handling Iran. Mark, you’ve been around for some time. Have you ever seen the public turn against a war right at the outset and quite this way?Jacob: No. When I was working at the Chicago Tribune on the nation-world desk, I was editing stories out of the Iraq War every day. And in that war, Bush prepared the public for it—obviously prepared the public with lies, but nonetheless, there was this preparatory period in which he was bringing out evidence, false or true, and there was this drumbeat. And there’s a reason for that, obviously. We’re seeing it now: When you prepare the American public, you have a discussion and you have consensus. He didn’t do that here.And this is, Greg, one of the main points of my newsletter today—there was no consulting Congress. There are laws in this country, and one of them is the Constitution, which says that Congress decides when we go to war. Another is the War Powers Act, which says that if you are not defending yourself, if you’re doing an offensive military action, you’ve got to go to Congress. And so Trump is clearly law breaking right now and being allowed to, which is really frightening. He’s operating like a king.Sargent: Yes. And I want to get into that aspect of your piece in a bit. I would just point out also that in relation to the run-up to Iraq, that happened with George W. Bush after a major terrorist attack on the country. Also, George W. Bush had only been in office for a very short time—the country wasn’t really aware of all the very profound shortcomings that he would ultimately exhibit. Whereas with Trump, there’s been no terror attack, and there’s also been a really long period in which voters have become accustomed to Trump’s terrible flaws. I think all these things working together make this situation politically much worse for Trump than anything Bush faced.Jacob: Well, and throw into that the fact that Trump, for the whole last decade, has been talking about how he doesn’t want to get into wars of choice, how these foreign wars are killing us and all this stuff—which, I wasn’t fooled, and I’m sure a lot of other people weren’t either, because Trump never really does anything policy-wise that helps the people at large. It’s always insiders who benefit, in this case defense contractors and etc., etc. His donors. But he was talking peace, and you talk peace for 10 years and then you do an optional war in which your own people are admitting that there’s no immediate threat—what else are you going to get from the American people other than shock and disgust?Sargent: Well, that is what we’re getting. A new Reuters poll is even worse for Trump. It finds only 27 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s attack on Iran. And here’s a key number: 56 percent say Trump is too willing to use military force. This shows how badly damaged Trump’s public image is already heading into this. What do you think?Jacob: Certainly. He was already way down in the polls. There’s actually not that much farther he can go, considering that some people will support absolutely anything he does because of the whole cult mentality, which we’ve been talking about for a long time. He really has lost the country, opinion-wise. And one thing that scares me is that as that happens, he becomes more desperate and does more erratic and autocratic things.Sargent: Well, this war really is one of those things. And this is going to be politically with us for a long time, potentially. The Times piece has more revelations that we’ll continue giving. For instance, in a recent meeting with congressional leaders, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made no mention of Trump’s plans to pursue regime change. And JD Vance, who’s supposed to be anti-interventionist, actually argued internally for them to go big, which might have prodded Trump in that direction. Mark, both Rubio and Vance are in the mix for 2028. I really wonder if this could end up being very problematic for them long term. How do you see this playing out? Jacob: Well, you can’t predict wars. This could be over in a week. It could be not over by the time the midterms happen. There’s just no predicting. What he’s done is unleash a Middle East war—it’s not just an attack between Israel, the U.S., and Iran; all these other countries are involved now. Lebanon is in it. So he has sparked a wide war in the Middle East, and you don’t put the genie back in the bottle that fast. So it’s going to be very damaging. I think yes, it hurts Rubio and Vance. I hope it hurts Rubio and Vance, because they deserve to be hurt for having recklessly advised the president. And you may find some Republicans start saying, Well, this is not a good idea. And they’ll do it after the primaries, Greg—that’s the really sad thing, is how cynical the Republican Party is at this point in time, to where they won’t move away from Trump until he has no chance to primary them. And as soon as the primaries are over, they’ll probably move really hard to the center. I don’t think they’ll be very credible doing it, but they will attempt to.Sargent: We should talk about the vulnerable House Republicans who are up for reelection. There’s a number of them and they’ve already been trying to run away from Trump’s tariffs and put distance between themselves and Donald Trump on health care and on the expiring ACA subsidies and so forth.The big tell is going to be what those House Republicans start saying about the war, presuming it’s still going on in a couple of months after the primaries are over. What do you think is going to happen there?Jacob: Well, we’ll have to see, first, whether there’s a vote in Congress—whether that happens this week or any time. My suspicion is Republicans will try to block it any way they can, just because they don’t want accountability. They just want everything to lay off on Trump. The Republican Party is really a bunch of cowards at this point. They want to make no decisions. They want to have no responsibility. They want to have no accountability. We didn’t really elect people to show up in Washington and sit on their hands, but that’s what’s happening.Here’s the scary thing: The worse Trump does in public opinion, the more dangerous he is, at this point. And you’ve already started seeing these moves toward fiddling with the elections. One thing about having a big war in the Middle East is you can get a situation where the federal government—Trump’s government—declares that there’s a bunch of terrorist threats, so we have to really clamp down on security, and therefore we’ll declare an emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and federalize our elections. He’s talking about that. And I’m just worried that the more unpopular he gets, the more likely that is to happen.Sargent: You’re talking about domestically—that Donald Trump is going to use any continuing war to sort of maximize his emergency powers at home.Jacob: Right. Also to say that there are Iranian sleeper cells—I mean, all kinds of stuff. They’re really good at making up stuff. They don’t have any credibility, but they sure talk a lot.Sargent: Well, the big through line with Trump, connecting all these different things, is that he feels zero need to explain himself to the public and just doesn’t think he’s bound by the law in any sense at all. This connects with what we’re seeing in Minneapolis, where his militias are murdering U.S. citizens with no accountability. And he’s killing supposed drug runners who are civilians in the Caribbean, and much more.He’s just bombing them. There again, it’s completely illegal. He didn’t go to Congress for any kind of justification or approval for that. You get at this through line well in your piece. It seems to me like the public gets that overall arc—the lawless arc. The CNN finding that 59 percent don’t trust Trump to make good decisions underscores that. What do you think?Jacob: I think so. The main theme of what I was writing was that Trump is behaving like a king with the power to decide life or death for people without asking anyone’s permission or explaining himself in any way, which is not the way that a president operates. That’s the way a king in ancient times operated.The sad thing is that all of his abuses aren’t equally felt by the public. At this point in time the war in Iran is still pretty distant to people. Now, once we start having identification of the Americans who were killed, and once—we had three planes shot down accidentally today—there’s going to be a big mess when you create a big war, and that’ll be more of an attention-getter for the American people.But as far as the killing of the alleged drug traffickers in the Pacific and the Caribbean—he didn’t present any evidence of that. Who knows whether those people are fishermen? He keeps making jokes about them being fishermen, which is crazy. And even if they were drug traffickers, that’s not a capital crime. Present evidence, arrest people, take them and put them in jail if they’re guilty. But this idea that the president of the United States can just decide we’re going to whack those people—that’s not the way this country operates.But Greg, my main point here is that what’s happening with the war of choice that Trump has done in Iran, and what he’s done with killing people in boats around Venezuela, doesn’t have as much impact on American public opinion as what ICE and Border Patrol have been doing in this country, because that’s right at home. Nobody thinks that the people of Minneapolis deserve this. And we see every day, if you’re paying any attention, that they’re creating a system of concentration camps around the country.So what are you going to do with those after you’ve deported all the immigrants? What are you going to do with all that empty space? That people are really scared about having an autocratic leader who has no regard for human life and is just abusive, illegal, corrupt, and has no ability to show any empathy toward people. You saw that today [when] he was talking about the drapes and the ballroom when he should have been talking about American deaths and deaths of other people. So this guy is a disaster, and he’s a disaster with a whole lot of power right now. I think the American people are starting to wake up to that. I hope they are.Sargent: Well, just to circle back to where we started—if you compare this situation with the run-up to the Iraq War and the early days of the Iraq War, there’s a basic difference here. Not only is there no actual crisis in this particular case, no rationale whatsoever, but voters—to go back to your point about the illegal killings in the Caribbean mattering less to voters than the assassinations or executions of American citizens in Minneapolis—the American people have had many, many months of getting bombarded by this imagery of outright lawless violence, extralegal violence being inflicted on Americans. They’ve been exposed to that fairly relentlessly. And I really think that seems to be conditioning them to see what’s going on abroad as something more alarming and more lawless than they otherwise might. Is that too optimistic?Jacob: No, I think you’re right. And another point related to that is that Homeland Security systematically lied about almost every clash it had with protesters, observers, or immigrants. I’m here in Chicago and we had the same thing before Minneapolis did—people were getting shot by ICE and they immediately lied about everything.A federal judge here in Chicago called them out for their lies. So it’s not like my opinion—they were lying. And now here we are in a time of war, when there’s a lot of uncertainty, and when your sons and daughters may be killed serving their country—people want the truth from their government, and they know they’re not going to get it from this bunch. And so I think the lack of credibility that they have wasted in Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles and Portland and everywhere else is coming home to roost here.Sargent: Yes, that’s exactly right. And it’s an important point. In the run-up to Iraq, in the early days of Iraq, people were shocked at the official lying that was going on—especially when it emerged that there were no WMDs in Iraq. In this case, the public has seen years and years of official lying from this bunch, and a level of lying that is unprecedented for a public official in the United States in modern times. And so it looks to me like there’s going to be a much harsher public judgment on this stuff up front. Where do you see it unfolding in the end? Jacob: Well, one other point on that is that it’s not just that the American people feel like they’re getting lied to—which they did after ... the invasion of Iraq—but they think that the Trump administration doesn’t know what it’s doing. They haven’t even come up with a good lie. I mean, this whole: Well, we want regime change; no, we don’t want regime change; we want the people to maybe rise up, maybe not; or we want to knock down their defenses. And this thing about them kind of admitting that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, but saying now that they’re building up their defenses so that we can’t attack their nuclear weapons if they ever build them—well, what that means is that they’re not allowed to have a defense.... That even defensive military by Iran is unacceptable. In other words, unless they surrender the whole country to the United States, it’s not acceptable. Nobody thinks that makes any sense. So what we’ve got here is a giant war developing and we have an even worse explanation for it than we had in 2003.Sargent: It sure looks that way. And I’m really heartened to see that the public is turning against this right at the outset, and boy do I hope it holds. Mark Jacob, awesome to talk to you. Folks, check out Mark’s Substack—it’s called Stop the Presses. Great to have you on.Jacob: Thanks for having me.

Dara Khosrowshahi on Robotaxi ‘Mission Control’ & Uber’s Next Billion-Dollar Business
57:43
Semafor Podcasts • 1 week ago

Dara Khosrowshahi on Robotaxi ‘Mission Control’ & Uber’s Next Billion-Dollar Business

Pete Hegseth’s Crazed, Angry Tirades on Iran Give Dems a Big Opening
New Republic • 1 week ago

Pete Hegseth’s Crazed, Angry Tirades on Iran Give Dems a Big Opening

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth knows that playing a decisive tough guy on television is the way to keep Donald Trump happy, so he did just that while addressing reporters Monday about the U.S. bombing of Iran. He hailed Trump’s supposed decisiveness. He strutted and preened about the bombing death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. He angrily ridiculed his questioners. He barked out hard-sounding phrases like “War is hell.”But what came out of Hegseth’s mouth was substantively about as clear as Trump’s Truth Social word vomit. He wouldn’t say whether American troops will face combat. He offered confusing depictions of our objectives, seemingly suggesting they’re about depriving Iran of “offensive capabilities” that remain hazily defined. He declared that “this is not a so-called regime-change war” while hailing Trump’s success thus far at ... regime change. Which echoes Trump himself: In one weekend interview, Trump offered at least two competing versions of the changed Iranian regime he hopes to see.All this gives Democrats an opening to take on this debate more forcefully. While some Democrats have gotten this right, more of them need to say forthrightly that this war is patently illegal and that Trump’s chief stated rationale for it—that Iran posed “imminent threats” to the United States—is utter nonsense.“Democrats need to strongly make the point that there was no imminent threat and that this war is a violation of the Constitution—and illegal,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me. “Absent congressional approval, this is an illegal war.”As Smith noted, there’s an important distinction between saying Iran poses a serious problem to the region and the world and claiming it was so on the verge of attacking the United States that it required urgent defensive action. “It is made up to say that they were going to attack us—that they posed an imminent threat,” Smith said.Some Democrats are stopping short of speaking this forcefully. Senate leader Chuck Schumer, for instance, has leaned hard on the suggestion that Trump officials merely have to be more forthcoming. They must “be straight with the American people about these strikes and what comes next,” Schumer said, demanding that officials divulge “critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat.” Other Democrats have used similar language.But this posture implies that there’s potentially a legitimate case to be made that Iran actually does pose a threat urgent enough to justify our attack—and that the administration merely hasn’t been sufficiently transparent about that justification. There is no reason whatsoever to grant even that much.The evidence is strong that Trump’s central claims about Iran are false, not merely that they haven’t been sufficiently explained to lawmakers. As The New York Times reports painstakingly, American officials with access to relevant intelligence say he’s “exaggerated the immediacy” of the threat Iran poses. Trump has claimed that Iran is on track to develop missiles that can hit the United States, but as the Times reports, that’s contradicted by the administration’s own assessments. Top Trump advisers have said Iran is “a week” away from having the materials for a nuke, but the Times notes that American officials say that’s not so.“Democrats don’t need the Trump administration to explain their reasoning,” Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, told me. “This isn’t a mystery to be solved. We already know all their reasons for war are bullshit. We already know everything we need to know to conclude: Iran does not pose an imminent threat to the United States.”Similarly, the evidence is also strong that Trump simply doesn’t care about accomplishing precise objectives—if he’s even articulated them at all. That’s the problem. It isn’t that officials haven’t been clear or forthcoming enough about those objectives.All this is overwhelmingly clear. Trump named at least two competing objectives in that aforementioned weekend interview. He also insisted protracted conflict “won’t be difficult,” but that notion has been privately undermined by his own top general, again illustrating his lack of serious deliberation. Trump has piously said he hopes the Iranian people take control of the country after the regime is (or isn’t?) deposed. Yet as Anne Applebaum shows, there is no sign anywhere of any plan to make this happen.Hegseth’s barking at reporters leaves little doubt about the lack of meaningfully clear objectives here. His suggestion that Iran’s “offensive capabilities” are unacceptable is absurdly vague. It seems designed to function as a bar that Trump can arbitrarily say Iran has failed to clear, thus justifying more aggression, dictated only by Trump’s passing whims.“By Hegseth’s standard, any country having any advanced defensive weaponry of any kind can be labeled an imminent threat,” Duss says. “Trump seems to be workshopping different objectives with reporters on the phone. Democrats don’t need a briefing to understand what’s going on.”Yes, virtually all Democrats will likely vote for a war powers resolution—set for consideration in both chambers this week—that would constrain Trump’s ability to wage war without congressional authorization. Trump will veto this if it passes, but it’s an important exercise. Though previous presidents like Barack Obama abused warmaking authorities—which some liberals criticized, including yours truly—Trump is taking this further. He’s refusing to seek authorization for the killings of supposed drug-running civilians in the Caribbean, as well as for the biggest military operation in the Mideast in decades. Democrats should relentlessly point this out.But that can’t be the end of the story. This can’t simply be about Trump’s procedural failures. It also has to be linked to a larger argument that he’s functioning as a maliciously unhinged, out-of-control despot, and thus is wrecking our system of self-rule at a foundational level. As David French argues, one can view Iran as a serious long-term problem while insisting that Trump operate within his constitutional powers, and that fundamental principles are at stake:Perhaps the most important aspect of this constitutional structure is that it creates a presumption of peace. Our nation cannot go to war until its leaders persuade a majority of Congress that war is in our national interest.It’s precisely because Trump has no meaningfully articulated objectives for this war—and because American officials privately admit his Iran claims are false—that he’s launching it illegally without congressional authorization. The same Republicans who insist Trump needn’t seek congressional approval are doing so precisely because this liberates them from having to vote on the underlying proposition that this war is in our country’s interests.Hegseth’s absurdities illustrate how big an opening Democrats really have here. It’s not enough to demand that officials be forthcoming and transparent. Democrats should argue that Trump has launched what is essentially a vanity war and nothing more—and that, as Smith put it to me, he’s “ruling like a king instead of the elected president of a constitutional republic.”

AI Is Going to Revolutionize Advertising in the Worst Imaginable Way
New Republic • 1 week ago

AI Is Going to Revolutionize Advertising in the Worst Imaginable Way

The inevitable has arrived. Ads have begun popping up on ChatGPT—even, reportedly, in initial responses to user queries, rather than after extended conversations—and some fans aren’t pleased. “RIP ChatGPT,” wrote one Reddit commenter. “It was fun while it lasted! 💔” The ads, which are being rolled out to free users and those who pay for the lowest-tier subscription ($8 per month), are rather familiar and banal in their presentation: a “sponsored” box pitching a product that ChatGPT’s algorithm thinks is relevant to the conversation, much as you’re used to seeing on social media platforms like Facebook and X.An enduring feature of advertising is that it is “geographically imperialistic”: The best place to put an ad is where one doesn’t exist already. But the best type of ad to place is one that is unrecognizable as an ad. These truths should be kept in mind amid the rollout of ads on ChatGPT. Rest assured, this is just the beginning of how OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, will monetize its users. The company will undoubtedly graduate to more sophisticated ads, at which point the only question will be whether users even realize when they’re being monetized. Artificial intelligence is an unfathomably expensive product to give away for free, yet that’s been OpenAI’s main strategy to achieve adoption. So it’s little wonder that the company is in dire financial straits, facing tens of billions of dollars in projected annual losses. How else to close that deficit save for digital billboards? The geographic expanse for commercial colonization—a reported 800 million weekly active users—was simply too vast for OpenAI to forgo. So ChatGPT’s users are right to bummed. Commercials clutter both the aesthetic and impetus of the online space. And the annoyance isn’t merely a pop-up to be blocked or a pre-roll to be skipped: Ads can’t help but corrupt the purpose of the content that they surround. But even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted that ad monetization is a real downer. “I think that ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me,” Altman said in 2024. “When I think of GPT writing me a response, if I had to go figure out, Exactly how much was who paying here to influence what I’m being shown? I don’t think I would like that.” But he also, notably, did not rule out ads on ChatGPT in the future.As the old adage goes: If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. For two centuries, the mass and social media industries depended on this bargain. Nascent newspapers of the “penny press” era could be sold below cost because advertisers subsidized the access to audiences. Likewise, today, no one pays for Google search or Instagram or TikTok. AI represents a qualitatively different revelation. It renders all the knowledge of the internet conversationally interactive. It outsources our critical thinking skills and regresses our decision-making to the mean. It’s been designed to seem human to secure our trust. It seduces our affections and indulges our delusions, often sycophantically so. It subs in for our therapists and friends alike and helps us raise our children.The consumer insights from that level of intellectual, emotional, and social intimacy exceed an advertiser’s wildest dreams. Fortuitously so: AI arrives at a confusing, anxious time on Madison Avenue. Google’s AI summaries are disintegrating the web as we know it, hastening a “zero-click” future, in which users have no need to avail themselves of the links below on the page. Hence, a shift from search engine optimization to “answer” or “generative” engine optimization: strategizing how brands and products appear, organically, in large language model inputs and outputs.ChatGPT makes that roundabout sell a much straighter line—for a price. And it is reportedly a steep one—with ad rates nearing those of NFL games. Large language models might be a black box—in terms of why they do what they do—but that ad pricing suggests OpenAI knows exactly what a gold mine of personal data it is excavating daily.That’s why we ought to treat OpenAI’s claims about its advertising with the same skepticism applied to the advertising itself. Sure, the company says it will insulate the ads as ostensibly independent from content. “Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what’s most helpful to you. Ads are always separate and clearly labeled,” the company insists. “We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers.” But that leaves a lot of marketing money on the table—and from the outside, it sure looks like OpenAI needs that money to stay afloat. Hence, the Super Bowl ad diss from OpenAI competitor Anthropic, the maker of Claude, whose commercial mocked the sponsored content that will inevitably intrude and inundate ChatGPT feeds. But mount that high horse at your peril, Anthropic. Unless there’s a clever way to pay for all those server farms and microchips, all other AI platforms will probably have to follow suit. (And if the Pentagon cuts ties with Anthropic, as it’s threatening to do, that day may come even sooner.) The history of social media foretells it: Platforms and their creators, once unspoiled by corporate backers, now pitch us relentlessly—and in increasingly devious ways. “Native” ads on Instagram and TikTok often look indistinguishable within the content, forming the basis of the $30 billion influencer industry. But the notion of placing an energy drink in the background of an influencer’s video will soon seem laughably conspicuous. By that point, the problem for ChatGPT users will no longer be that they notice and get annoyed with ads. The problem—and the real money to be made by OpenAI—will be when they don’t.

The Editor Who Helped Build a Golden Age of American Letters
New Republic • 1 week ago

The Editor Who Helped Build a Golden Age of American Letters

According to American publishing mythology, there was a time when giants bestrode Midtown Manhattan. They came from Chicago, from Oregon, from Pennsylvania, from nearby New Jersey, or from the outer reaches of the city itself: Coney Island, the Bronx. Bellow, Kesey, Updike, Roth, Heller, Doctorow. Gardner and Barth, Pynchon and Coover, Mailer and Malamud. They did battle with editors Gottlieb, Giroux, Straus, Epstein, Lish, Cowley. From the rubble of their contests rose great and enduring monuments that won plaudits from Manhattan to Stockholm. But nothing lasts forever. The bean counters and synergists came to the towers; and the age of heroes passed, and the age of widgets began. Or so the story goes. And in many ways, it’s true: The U.S. publishing industry flourished in the 40 or so years following World War II, both economically and creatively. Serious writers were also blockbuster sellers, and even their agents became celebrities. But beginning in the mid-1960s, the major trade houses that published these writers were acquired by larger, diversified companies—at first, industrial conglomerates like Gulf+Western, and later, media corporations like Disney, News Corp, and Paramount. Books, literary ones especially, are only a minor and unimportant portion of these companies’ “content,” to use a term this era has dumped on us, and they don’t even make much money.This isn’t really the story that Gerald Howard tells in his The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, a biography of the memoirist, critic, editor, teacher, and general “middleman of letters” who orbited the nucleus of American writing for almost 60 years. But at the same time, it is. Despite the fact that less than a third of The Insider concerns that golden age, the “triumph of American literature” that Howard exalts in his book’s subtitle is just that: the period when the publishing industry’s fortunes and the prestige and international reputation of American writing thrived in tandem. The story of Cowley’s career is a story not just of the convergence of generational literary talent but of a country refining the image it would present to the rest of the world.The story of Cowley’s career is a story not just of the convergence of generational literary talent but of a country refining the image it would present to the rest of the world.Cowley usually isn’t counted among the colossi of the Great American Novel and its broad-shouldered editors. But Howard has made a canny choice in proposing Cowley as the key figure in legitimizing American writing, one that complicates this golden-age legend. For more than almost anyone except the novelists themselves, Cowley was the bridge between the Lost Generation writers of the 1920s and their successors in the 1950s and 1960s. And without those Lost Generation modernists’ ability to sweep away European prejudices about the puerility of American writing, our golden-age giants never would have trodden the earth. Born in 1898, the aspiring poet Cowley grew up primarily in Pittsburgh and went to Harvard as a scholarship boy, where he had his first encounters with past and future literary celebrities: John Dos Passos, Amy Lowell, and Robert Hillyer, who would later figure in the cultural wars over Ezra Pound and modernism. In 1917, he joined the American Field Service as a camion and ambulance driver on the Western Front of World War I and, after what he called a “long furlough,” returned to France in 1921, this time armed with an AFS scholarship to pursue graduate study at the University of Montpellier. He didn’t stick around the South of France for long. By the following year (1922, the annus mirabilis of modernism), he was already enough of a Lost Generation scenester that Ernest Hemingway referred to him as “the American poet with … a stupid look on his potato face” and Robert McAlmon called him “the young intellectual fairly slow on the uptake.” But by the time he returned to the U.S. in 1923, he had met and won over almost everyone in Paris who mattered. Out of this experience came one of the essential memoirs of the period, 1934’s Exile’s Return. Despite its focus on Harry Crosby and Cowley’s close friend Hart Crane, rather than on better-known writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Exile’s Return made Cowley into one of the most influential portraitists of a period that was already passing into gauzy memory. For in the intervening years, Cowley had become one of the most visible critics in American literary life, writing with confidence and authority about these figures and contemporary authors (primarily in this magazine, where he served as literary editor throughout the 1930s). And, in keeping with a general leftward lurch in the American literary scene, Cowley began raising the Red flag. He had, Howard says in an apt image, transformed himself into “a literary action figure, a man in ceaseless motion riding a wave of cultural and political revolution.” Although Cowley’s communism came from a genuine commitment to social activism, he did himself no favors by reflexively toeing the party line. Through almost every one of the crises and exposures that peeled more leftists away from the party—from the show trials to the Ukrainian famine to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact—Cowley sided with Stalin, even if he always remained merely a fellow-traveler. Cowley’s belated noster culpa—issued in 1940 in, and on behalf of, The New Republic—came too late. He was demoted at TNR and lost his job in the wartime Office of Facts and Figures. For decades, reviewers of his books would use their column inches to slash at his inexcusable political judgment. Howard duly rehashes these spats between the Partisan Review left and the dwindling rump of Soviet apologists perhaps too thoroughly, given that the real story here is the building of American literary reputations. Shut out of the plum positions because of his political sins, Cowley became a triple-threat hired gun: reporting, reviewing, editing. And it’s here, Howard argues, that Cowley’s skill set brought about “the triumph of American literature.” Booming after the war, in part because the public-private Armed Forces Editions had turned millions of soldiers into avid readers, the publishing industry rolled out innovations like the trade paperback and, at Viking, the “Portable Library” series, one-volume pocket anthologies of a major writer’s major works. Cowley assembled the Portable Hemingway in 1944, contributing an introduction that, for the first time, laid out the “subterranean, symbolic, and even mythic” dimension of Hemingway’s work. These weren’t just fishing stories!Five years later, working closely with the author, Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner, a brilliant selection demonstrating how William Faulkner, whose books were almost all out of print at that time, had created a cunning little universe in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in which the sins of the South and of the nation as a whole were laid bare. And while he didn’t edit the Portable Fitzgerald (that job went to Dorothy Parker), in 1951 Cowley put together Scribner’s Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which brought into relief all the depth beneath the champagne frivolity.Cowley combined his cultural credibility, his editorial skills, and the particular affordances of the postwar publishing industry to help turn three writers—none of whom were considered particularly important, and only one of whom was widely read—into Serious Authors, at the very time when the U.S. was engaging in a broad cultural-diplomatic campaign to convince skeptical European intellectuals that “American culture” wasn’t an oxymoron. These three monuments, or “interventions in the great game of literary reputation and advancement,” as Howard calls them, packaged a prehistory that made the golden age possible.In his next act, Cowley chaperoned two counterculturists into the club. In a delicate yearslong dance, in 1957 Cowley persuaded Viking to take a chance on the seemingly formless and definitely obscene travelogue On the Road, by a vagabond named Jack Kerouac, which Howard counts as Cowley’s most significant achievement. Five years later, he plucked one of his students in the new MFA program at Stanford out of obscurity, and made Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest an “immediate hit” and Kesey “a genuine literary star.” Kerouac and Kesey “were as influential in defining the culture of the sixties as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were in the twenties,” Howard concludes. And, I would add, Cowley’s work as a “literary bureaucrat” had an immeasurable effect on the reputations of all four, with Faulkner thrown in as a chaser. The generation that followed Cowley would preside over an extraordinary flowering of American literature, often invigorated by talented and entrepreneurial figures from the margins, which a number of recent studies have joined Howard in documenting. Shut out of publishing until the early twentieth century, Jewish bookmen like Alfred A. Knopf, Ben Huebsch, and Horace Liveright had to start their own firms and take chances on untested new writers. The bets, both financial and literary, paid off, and in The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature, Josh Lambert details how next-generation Jewish editors like Jason Epstein and Robert Gottlieb became such heavyweights in postwar book culture that critic Richard Kostelanetz, in 1974, credited them with having “unprecedented power to determine what writing might be taken seriously and what would be neglected or wiped out.”Earlier accounts of this era have tended to overlook the work of women writers and editors. Fortunately, this is changing. In The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, Amy Reading details White’s editing of John Cheever, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, and other giants of the golden age. But its greater interest is in the women she encouraged, such as Janet Flanner and Kay Boyle, whom she helped reach the kind of broad audience that trade publishing denied them. White even rescued Elizabeth Bishop from the slush pile: Her predecessor as poetry editor, Charles Pearce, had rejected 13 consecutive poems, and upon taking up her new position in 1945, a horrified White had to “engag[e] in relationship repair” to persuade Bishop to send in more work. Knopf’s Judith Jones is best known for bringing Julia Child and Anne Frank to the world, but in The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, Sara Franklin shows that Jones had a sharp ear for poetry as well, cultivating Sharon Olds and snapping up Sylvia Plath’s first collection, The Colossus—although she inexplicably turned down The Bell Jar, one of the most reliable sellers of postwar American literature. No editor can get everything right.Even though Toni Morrison is best known as a Nobel-winning novelist, she was also one of the “hidden figures” of publishing, as the Howard University scholar Dana A. Williams makes clear in her Toni at Random. Morrison’s work from 1971 to 1983 as a fiction editor at Random House gave Black writers such as Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, and Leon Forrest access to the most prestigious imprints. Deeply influenced by the Black Arts Movement’s insistence that Black art should stem from Black cultural roots and not aim for validation by white cultural institutions, Morrison took on as her first editorial project an anthology, Contemporary African Literature, whose contributors “were talking to other Black people, not to white colonialists to whom the authors had nothing to prove.”Ultimately, these heroic writers and editors were not primarily responsible for this golden age of American literature and literary culture, which was in truth the product of much broader trends: near-universal literacy, the dramatic expansion of higher education, widespread economic prosperity, a growing middle class with lots of leisure time and money to spend on it, and a nation desperate to prove to the world it now led that it had a culture worthy of respect. These monuments, these novels, both documented and were the expressions of this new America.The U.S. today has shakier infrastructure to support writers than many other countries—less affordable housing, a dwindling supply of day jobs in adjacent creative fields. Today’s corporate publishing landscape isn’t just different in degree from that time. It’s an entirely new world, one in which, as Dan Sinykin has documented in his study Big Fiction, a truly independent literary culture, and truly independent editors, cannot thrive. The relentless logic of capitalism is certainly in part to blame, but the novel is just no longer the axis around which the cultural conversation rotates. Indeed, there is no longer a cultural conversation but myriad cultural conversations, monologues, debates, cacophonies happening in forms much shorter and more kinetic and spectacular, forms abjectly unsuited for the kind of genuine contemplation and empathy that is the novel’s forte. And those recent novelists whose works have driven cultural conversation—Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sally Rooney, Sayaka Murata—are often not American.Perhaps the conglomerate era is to blame for the decline of America’s centrality to world literary culture, as Sinykin implies. Just as important, perhaps, is that the U.S. today has shakier infrastructure to support writers than many other countries—less affordable housing, a dwindling supply of day jobs in adjacent creative fields. And at the same time, its literary culture became ever more inward-looking and complacent about its own preeminence. Seventy years ago, Cowley helped establish American literature’s legitimacy, which gave cultural and intellectual heft to America’s audacious Cold War–era assertion of primacy on the world stage. This project, one might dryly observe, is no longer a national priority. And over the last year, we have learned what follows a golden age: an age of DGAF.

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