The price of loyalty
January 13, 2004
My old teacher and former editor Ron Suskind is making all kinds of waves this week with his new book The Price of Loyalty, a damning account of life inside the Bush White House, fueled largely by interviews and documents from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.
I'm pleased to see Ron doing so well for himself. Ron gave me my first real break as a writer back when I was a lost liberal arts grad just out of college, assigning me stories for the long-since-defunct Boston Business magazine (which in retrospect turned out a pretty solid stable of writers, including Paul Keegan, Stephanie Zacharek and the late Caroline Knapp).
What always impressed me about Ron was his remarkable capacity for blending tenacity with compassion, his ability to write from a genuine and sometimes deeply personal place without sacrificing his steely journalistic dispassion. That facility comes through powerfully in his Pulitzer-winning Hope In the Unseen, the story of a young kid from the projects named Cedric Jennings, who goes through all kinds of personal hell before making good and going on to Brown. Judging from the excerpts I've seen to date, Suskind seems to approach O'Neill empathetically without getting overly cozy - though I suppose it's fair to say that Ron probably failed to cultivate a whole lot of compassion for Karl Rove (for which, of course, I can hardly blame him).
File under: Books
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