CANR
WORK TITLE: Where Tyranny Begins
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2020
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 7, 1967, in Hartford, CT; son of Harvey L. Rohde, Jr., and Carol Ruffo; married Kristen Mulvihill (an editor); children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A., 1990; studied at Bates College.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., production assistant, 1990-91, 1993; freelance reporter, 1991-92; Philadelphia Inquirer, suburban correspondent, 1993- 94; Christian Science Monitor, national reporter and editor, 1994; foreign correspondent, 1994-96; New York Times, reporter, 1997-2011; Reuters, New York, NY, columnist, 2011—13; investigative reporter, 2014-15, editor, 2015-17; New Yorker, executive editor, 2017-23; NBC News, national security editor, 2023-present.
MEMBER:Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, board member.
AWARDS:Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, George Polk Award, Overseas Press Club prize, Sigma Delta Chi Award, Investigative Reporters and Editors award, Livingston Award, Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, all 1996; Pulitzer Prize, 2008, for New York Times team coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan; Michael Kelly Award, 2010; World Press Freedom Hero, International Press Institute, 2012.
WRITINGS
Author of foreword, Evil Doesn’t Live Here: Posters from the Bosnian War, by Daoud Sarhandi and Alina Boboc, Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.
SIDELIGHTS
As a journalist David Rohde has covered a wide range of foreign affairs, from May Day festivities in Cuba to presidential elections in Syria. He is perhaps best known for his work in Bosnia during the summer and fall of 1995.
The collapse of the Soviet Union had kindled hopes of independence in some Yugoslavian republics. When Croatia announced its secession in 1991, bloody fighting broke out between Croat and Serb ethnic groups. The violence spread to the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where a large Muslim minority was caught in the middle. The United Nations deployed peacekeeping troops in an effort to prevent the Bosnian Serbs, backed by the powerful Serbian army, from overrunning the republic. In 1993 the United Nations declared several Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia “safe areas” and authorized the use of force to repel Serb aggression. Nevertheless, the Serbs attacked and occupied the safe area of Srebrenica, near the Serbian border, in July of 1995. While women and children fled to Muslim territory, as many as seven thousand Muslim men were slaughtered and buried in mass graves nearby.
At the time Rohde was the Balkan correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Having heard stories of the executions and armed with a faxed satellite photo of suspected grave sites, he entered Serb-held Bosnia in August and became the first Western observer to return with evidence corroborating the rumors. He made a second foray in October and discovered more sites, but was captured by the Serbs and spent ten days in prison before pressure from the Clinton administration (then conducting peace talks in Dayton, Ohio) brought about his release. His courageous reporting of the Srebrenica massacre earned Rohde many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.
Endgame
Rohde’s work in Bosnia is brought together in Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War II. The book gives a day-by- day account of the city’s fall through the eyes of seven principal witnesses representing the various sides in the conflict: three Muslims (including two men who survived the exterminations), a Bosnian Serb and a Croat soldier fighting with the Serbs, and two Dutch peacekeepers. Also appearing are the major military and political players in the struggle, including U.S. president Bill Clinton, French president Jacques Chirac, United Nations special representative Yasushi Akashi, United Nations force commander general Bernard Janvier, Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladic, and charismatic Muslim defender Naser Oric. Though the text cuts back and forth between these and other figures, the underlying narrative of Srebrenica’s fall and the refugee exodus to central Bosnia allows the reader to follow events and shifts in perspective with minimal difficulty. Thomas A. Karel, a reviewer for Library Journal, wrote that “this is an effective way to depict a gruesome and infuriating event.”
Critics found that Rohde’s collage of voices effectively sets the often arbitrary and ill-considered decisions of the leaders beside the typically catastrophic effects of those decisions on ordinary people. The author makes liberal use of dialogue and dramatizes the inner life of his “characters” so that some critics found that much of Endgame reads like a novel. “Rohde manages his material with the hand of a novelist, describing settings and atmosphere, developing characters, highlighting the horror of events,” commented a critic for Kirkus Reviews. The sources of these reconstructions are, however, amply documented in footnotes. Maps and other explanatory materials are also used.
In addition to describing the huge toll in human suffering, Rohde aims to show how the waffling, poor judgment, and indifference of the United States, United Nations, and Europe contributed to a tragedy that could have been prevented. Calls for NATO air strikes against the Serbs advancing on Srebrenica were rebuffed, and the outgunned Dutch peacekeepers in effect handed the city over to its attackers. The debacle spawned various conspiracy theories assigning blame to secret deals between the parties. While much of what happened in and around Srebrenica remains shrouded in doubt, Rohde’s general conclusion is direct: “The international community partially disarmed thousands of men, promised them they would be safeguarded and then delivered them to their sworn enemies. Srebrenica was not simply a case of the international community standing by as a far-off atrocity was committed. The actions of the international community encouraged, aided and emboldened the executioners.”
Endgame was well received by reviewers. In his Library Journal review, Karel declared Endgame “an important and revealing book,” while Tom Gjelten, writing for the Washington Post Book World, commented, “Rohde tells the Srebrenica story with all the shades of gray truth demanded.” The critic for Kirkus Reviews praised Rohde’s “keen analysis and powerful convictions,” concluding that the book is “a passionate account, and an important addition to the growing library of books about the Bosnian catastrophe.”
A Rope and a Prayer
With his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, Rohde published A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides in 2010. The book relates Rohde’s kidnapping by the Taliban while researching a book in Afghanistan in 2008. He shares his personal experience as a captive for over seven months while Mulvihill chronicles the multiple efforts made to secure his release.
Reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times, Bruce Wallace suggested that the book “may find an audience beyond the specialized tastes of the counter-insurgency crowd.” Wallace summarized that “Rohde was clearly unwilling to abandon all the reporting he had done for his original book. He intersperses his narrative with primers on how U.S. engagement in Afghanistan has gone awry at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The Afghan war is entering its 10th year, waged almost absentmindedly by Americans preoccupied by economic pain at home.” Wallace pointed out that “it is an indictment of that attention deficit that many Americans may discover how badly it is going only through the popular appeal of one man’s story of suffering at the hands of the enemy and the courage of the woman who stood by him.” Booklist contributor Connie Fletcher found Rohde’s telling of the ordeal “compelling.”
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Doug Stanton observed that the account “offers an engaging and perceptive explanation of what has gone wrong in Afghanistan since 2001, and what might go right as President Obama stares at his July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing the 100,000 troops deployed there. A Rope and a Prayer should be required reading for anyone who is a fan of Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, Rory Stewart’s Places In Between, or Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban—that is, for anyone who wants to understand the complicated relationships among the Taliban, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly opined that “this potent story of love and conflict ends well, but not without making some smart and edgy commentary.” A Kirkus Review critic described A Rope and a Prayer as “a painstakingly reconstructed, harrowing account by a seasoned expert in the region.”
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Rohde left the New York Times and joined Reuters in 2011, working first as a columnist, then an investigative reporter, and finally an editor. In the middle of his time there, he wrote the relatively short (221 pages) Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East. The book surveys the actions the United States took in Afghanistan and Iraq and then how America reacted after the Arab Spring began in late 2010. The focus is on how Washington squandered money it earmarked for nation building by siphoning it through contractors, and how it failed to take advantage of the shifting situation in the Middle East.
Peter Beinart, writing in the New York Times Book Review, summarized Rohde’s approach as exposing “the deep contradiction between Washington’s long experiment in slashing the civilian instruments of American power and its post-9/11 attempt to use those same instruments to remake the greater Middle East.” Beinart appreciated that Rohde does not simply blame the George W. Bush administration but analyzes how Washington’s dysfunction continued into the Barack Obama years. A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a clarion call for change and more–not less–engagement with Islam.” They called Rohde’s writing “stirring” and an “impassioned discussion of the need to rebuild shriveled and atrophied institutions of foreign policy and diplomacy.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly praised Rohde as “sufficiently pragmatic” in his analysis and predicted that “readers interested in American foreign policy and sustainable development will appreciate the book’s substance and approach.”
From 2017 to 2023, Rohde was an executive editor at the New Yorker. In 2020, towards the end of the Donald Trump administration, Rohde wrote about the “deep state,” a favorite phrase of Trump’s and his supporters to explain why Trump was being investigated by the FBI. Rohde’s book, In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State,” surveys fifty years of scandals in those two agencies, starting with the Church Committee in 1975 and moving through Edward Snowden’s leaks of surveillance by the National Security Agency to Trump’s complaints about bureaucrats in his own government. Rohde turns Trump’s accusations around, however, and argues that Trump and aides and officials loyal to him constitute a variation on the deep state.
“A vital investigation for this election year—and beyond,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They lauded the book as “revelatory” and “immaculately researched.” Fred Kaplan, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote that “some of the book’s most fascinating passages trace the rise of William Barr,” who began his career as a CIA intern and then worked in the Ronald Reagan White House before eventually becoming Trump’s Attorney General. Kaplan argues that Barr and other conservative lawyers are “worth an entire book.” Writing in the Washington Post, Dina Temple-Raston called In Deep a “fascinating new book,” and she argues that one of Rohde’s most interesting points is how the idea of a deep state is “inextricably linked to a particular view of presidential power.”
Rohde’s next stop after leaving the New Yorker in 2023 was NBC News, where he worked as a national security editor. The following year, he wrote another book about the Trump administration and the FBI, Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy. In it, Rohde describes how Trump was able to use the Justice Department, including the FBI, to his advantage, and how he sowed doubt about those institutions in ways that lasted long after he left office. Rohde also analyzes how the Department of Justice is not able to serve as a check on presidential power, and he argues that new reforms are needed, such as were enacted after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. “A cautionary, relevant study” is how a writer in Kirkus Reviews described this outing. They called the book “hard-hitting” and “characterized by careful research and documentation.” They predicted that many readers will find Rohde’s arguments convincing.
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Rohde, David S., Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War II, Farrar, Straus (New York, NT), 1997.
Rohde, David S., and Kristen Mulvihill, A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides, Viking (New York, NY), 2010.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 1997, Mary Carroll, review of Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War II, p. 1476; November 1, 2010, Connie Fletcher, review of A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides, p. 14.
Books & Culture, January 1, 1999, review of Endgame, p. 10.
Christian Science Monitor, May 5, 1997, Leonard Bushkoff, review of Endgame, p. 15; January 11, 2011, Books Jackson Holahan, review of A Rope and a Prayer.
Contemporary Review, November 1, 1997, review of A Safe Area: Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since the Second World War, p. 275.
Economist, June 21, 1997, review of Endgame, p. R8.
Foreign Affairs, November-December, 2013, review of Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1997, review of Endgame, p. 448; September 15, 2010, review of A Rope and a Prayer; February 15, 2013, review of Beyond War; April 15, 2020, review of In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State”; June 1, 2024, review of Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy.
Library Journal, May 1, 1997, Thomas A. Karel, review of Endgame, p. 126.
London Review of Books, December 11, 1997, review of A Safe Area, p. 12.
Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2010, Bruce Wallace, review of A Rope and a Prayer.
New York, June 22, 2009, Matthew Cole, “The David Rohde Puzzle.”
New York Review of Books, November 20, 1997, Mark Danner, review of Endgame, p. 56.
New York Times, June 20, 2009, Tomas Munita, “Times Reporter Escapes Taliban after 7 Months”; October 17, 2009, Tomas Munita, “7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity.”
New York Times Book Review, May 11, 1997, John Grimond, review of Endgame, p. 22; August 18, 1997, Brian Hall, review of Endgame; December 24, 2010, Doug Stanton, review of A Rope and a Prayer; May 5, 2013, Peter Beinart, “Send In the Contractors,” review of Beyond War, p. 9(L); May 3, 2020, Fred Kaplan, “Who’s Running the Government?” review of In Deep, p. 12(L).
Publishers Weekly, October 11, 2010, review of A Rope and a Prayer, p. 36; February 4, 2013, review of Beyond War, pp. 57+.
Reference & Research Book News, February 1, 1998, review of Endgame, p. 23.
Washington Post Book World, July 6, 1997, review of Endgame, p. 5.
Washingtonpost.com, May 1, 2020, Dina Temple-Raston, “The ‘Deep State’: From Scholarly Critique to Toxic Conspiracy Theory,” review of In Deep.
ONLINE
A Rope and a Prayer Web site, http: //aropeandaprayerthebook.com/ (December 16, 2011), author profile.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org/ (July 1, 1998), review of Endgame.
Lavin Agency, https://thelavinagency.com (July 4, 2024), author profile.
New York Times Web site, http://projects.nytimes.com/held-by-the-taliban/ (December 16, 2011), interactive video series.
Yahoo! News, http:// news.yahoo.com/ (June 28, 2011), Joe Pompeo, “Reuters Poaches Star Times Reporter David Rohde.”*
David S. Rohde
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"David Rohde" redirects here. For the political scientist, see David W. Rohde.
David S. Rohde
Rohde at the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes
Born David Stephenson Rohde
August 7, 1967 (age 56)
Maine, United States
Education Brown University (B.A., 1990)
Occupation Investigative journalist
Notable credit(s) 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner
2010 Michael Kelly Award winner
Spouse Kristen Mulvihill
David Stephenson Rohde (born August 7, 1967) is an American author and investigative journalist, he is the former online news director for The New Yorker and now serves as Senior Executive Editor, National Security, for NBC News.[1] While a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1996 for his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre. From 2002 until 2005, he was co-chief of The New York Times' South Asia bureau, based in New Delhi, India. He later contributed to the newspaper's team coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan that received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and was a finalist in his own right in the category in 2010.[2][3] He is also a global affairs analyst for CNN.[4]
While in Afghanistan, Rohde was kidnapped by members of the Taliban in November 2008, but managed to escape in June 2009 after seven months in captivity. While he was in captivity, The New York Times collaborated with a number of media outlets, including al-Jazeera[5] and Wikipedia,[6][7] to remove news of the kidnapping from the public eye. This was done to decrease his value as a hostage and bargaining chip, and so increase his chances of eventual survival.
Background
Rohde is a native of Maine.[8] He is a graduate of Fryeburg Academy, a boarding school located in Fryeburg, Maine.[9] He attended Bates College before transferring to Brown University, where he received a B.A. in history in 1990.[10] He is married to Kristen Mulvihill, a picture editor for Cosmopolitan magazine.[11]
Reporting
Rohde worked as a production secretary for the ABC News World News Tonight program from June 1990 to August 1991 and as a production associate for ABC's New Turning Point from January to July 1993. He has also worked as a freelance reporter based in the Baltic republics, Cuba, and Syria. He served as a county and municipal reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer from July 1993 to June 1994 before joining The Christian Science Monitor. He initially covered national news, reporting from Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C.[12] In November 1994, he was sent to Zagreb, Croatia, to work as the newspaper's Eastern European correspondent,[13] in which role he helped to expose the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Muslim population of eastern Bosnia. He joined The New York Times in April 1996[14] and worked for them through mid-2011. He reported from Afghanistan for the first three months of the US-led war against the Taliban and served as co-chief of the Times's South Asia bureau from 2002 to 2005. From 2005 to 2011, he was a member of the Times's investigations department in New York City.[2] Before joining The New Yorker in May 2017, he worked for Reuters in a variety of capacities, including foreign affairs columnist (2011-2013), investigative reporter (2014-2015) and national security investigations editor (2015-2017).[15]
He was described by his Times colleagues as "an intrepid yet unassuming reporter who conducts himself modestly around the office, predictably attired in neatly ironed Oxford shirts and, often, his weathered Boston Red Sox cap."[2]
Srebrenica
Rohde was the first outside eyewitness of the aftermath of the Srebrenica massacre[16] when he traveled to the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica and Zepa in August 1995, a month after the fall of the towns to the Army of the Republika Srpska. He reported seeing human bones, "Muslim prayer beads, clothing and still legible receipts and election ballots from Srebrenica", as well as shell casings and ammunition boxes in the vicinity of three large mass graves. He described being told that Bosnian Serb troops were hunting down and summarily executing Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) from the town.[17][18] He subsequently located eyewitnesses to the massacre and wrote about the circumstances that led up to the killings.[12]
He returned to the Republika Srpska in October 1995 to follow up his article on the Srebrenica massacre, but was secretly arrested by Bosnian Serb authorities on October 29 in the town of Zvornik, around 80 miles from Sarajevo. He was charged with "illegal border crossing and staying on the territory of the Republika Srpska and for falsifying documents".[19] He was held captive in the Bosnian Serb-held town of Bijeljina for ten days, during which he was repeatedly interrogated, harassed and kept in a 10-foot-by-20-foot (3m by 7m) cell with five other inmates for over 23 hours a day. Rohde was sentenced to 15 days' imprisonment on the first two charges and was due to be sentenced on the spying charge before he was released.[20] The trial had been held in Serbo-Croatian and, although a translator was present,[21] there was no defense lawyer and no US diplomatic representation as required by the Vienna Convention. The espionage charge, the most serious of the three, was "punishable by three to 15 years (imprisonment) in peacetime and 10 years to death in wartime."[12]
Rohde's capture was not initially admitted by the Bosnian Serb authorities, who gave conflicting answers as to whether he had been detained and where he was being held. Five days after he was taken prisoner, the Bosnian Serb news agency issued a statement on his capture. The US Government subsequently brought to bear intense diplomatic pressure to release him. A key role was played by Kati Marton, an author and journalist married to the US envoy Richard Holbrooke, who was negotiating with the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević to end the Bosnian War. Marton, who was at the time the chairwoman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, intervened repeatedly during the talks that led to the Dayton Agreement to persuade Milošević to use his influence to secure Rohde's release.[22] The US Secretary of State Warren Christopher was also involved in pressing for Rohde's release at the Dayton talks.[23] A variety of other political and journalistic figures were also involved in campaigning on Rohde's behalf, including Senator Bob Dole, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Samantha Power, and David Frost.[24] Rohde was subsequently pardoned by order of the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžić in what Karadžić characterized as a goodwill gesture.[25]
Following his release, Rohde reported that he had reached Srebrenica and found substantial evidence of the massacre at four of six of the mass grave sites previously identified by US reconnaissance aircraft and satellites and commented: "A final, accurate accounting of the Srebrenica massacres will only come if Sahanici and the other five sites are dredged for the truth." He described the circumstances of his arrest: "This correspondent changed the date of issue on a Bosnian Serb press accreditation from 19/12/94 to 29/10/95 and used it to pass through Bosnian Serb checkpoints and reach the area. This correspondent was arrested at the execution site by Bosnian Serb police, stripped of all documents and photos taken of the area, accused of espionage, and jailed for 10 days."[26] His ordeal in captivity and the subsequent negotiations to free him were described in detail in a three-part special report published a few days later.[21][27][28]
Rohde's reporting from Bosnia, according to the British journalist Henry Porter, "had a deep effect on the journalists who had covered the Bosnian civil war. They became not so much militarised as passionately committed to fighting Milosevic's regime ... if Rohde had not – at some personal risk – set out to prove the rumours about the massacres, a great truth would have been buried along with the thousands of men from Srebrenica."[29] Porter observed that "the extent of the slaughter might not have emerged if it had not been for the bravery of David Rohde."[30]
Rohde went on to testify before the US House of Representatives Committee on Security and Cooperation in Europe in December 1995 on what he had seen at Srebrenica.[31] He returned to Srebrenica with a group of Western reporters at the start of April 1996, reporting that "approximately 70 percent of the larger of the two mass graves and approximately 50 percent of the smaller of the two have been recently dug up" and that other evidence that he had seen the previous October had been removed.[32]
Also in April 1996, Rohde won the Polk Award for foreign reporting, being cited for "risking his life to uncover the Srebrenica massacres of Bosnian Muslims, the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust."[33] Shortly afterwards, Rohde was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize "for his persistent on-site reporting of the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.[34]
In 1997, Rohde published a widely acclaimed account of the massacre, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II (published in paperback as A Safe Area: Srebrenica – Europe's Worst Massacre Since the Second World War). It was described as a "masterly" account of how "good – but conflicted and weakly held – Western intentions were swept away by the racist imperatives of the Serb leaders."[33] Writing in The Guardian, Julian Borger declared it to be "essential reading" and commented: "It is journalism at its committed best – painstaking, compassionate, full of telling detail and rigorous in its judgments."[35]
Rohde's work was the subject of study by a class in "Elements of International Reporting" at Columbia University's journalism school in spring 2001. The study explained: "We felt that Rohde's work was ideal for a case study in reporting on gross human rights violations, presenting opportunities to study both the professional techniques and the moral issues that pertain to such work."[8]
Detainees
While at The New York Times, Rohde has written about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has reported among other things on the hardships endured by men detained and released from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.[36] During 2004 and 2005 he wrote extensively on the treatment of detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He also broke the story of the full extent of the US Government's roundup of American Muslims following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The American Prospect noted:
Because of pervasive secrecy, little was known about how the detainees were treated until The New York Times published a story by David Rohde on January 20, 2003. It was datelined Karachi, Pakistan. Rohde had interviewed six Pakistani men deported from the United States after being detained in John Ashcroft's sweep.[37]
In April 2009, Rohde shared in a second Pulitzer Prize, awarded to the staff of The New York Times for "its masterful, groundbreaking coverage of America's deepening military and political challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reporting frequently done under perilous conditions."[38]
Kidnapping
Main article: Kidnapping of David Rohde
In November 2008, while in Afghanistan doing research for a book, Rohde and two associates were kidnapped by members of the Taliban. After being held captive for seven months and ten days, in June 2009 Rohde and one of his associates escaped and made their way to safety. The other associate escaped a month later.[39] During his captivity, Rohde's colleagues at The New York Times appealed to other members of the news media not to publish any stories relating to the abduction. The resulting media blackout of Rohde's kidnapping has caused a wider debate about the responsibility to report news in a timely manner.[5][40][41] Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales complied with a request from the Times to maintain the blackout, which he did through several administrators.[6]
Recognition
In January 2012, Rohde was named one of the International Press Institute's World Press Freedom Heroes.[42]
See also
List of solved missing person cases
Bibliography
Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II (1997; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; ISBN 0-374-25342-0 / 1998; Westview Press; ISBN 0-8133-3533-7)
A Safe Area: Srebrenica – Europe's Worst Massacre Since the Holocaust, 1997.
David Rohde and Kristen Mulvihill, A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides, 2010.
In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America's "Deep State" (2020. W. W. Norton & Company)
David Rohde
BOARD MEMBER
David Rohde is the Senior Executive Editor for National Security at NBC News. He is a former executive editor of the NewYorker.com and reporter for Reuters, The New York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, in 1996, for stories that helped expose the Srebrenica massacre during the war in Bosnia, and, in 2009, he shared a Pulitzer Prize with a team of Times reporters for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the author of four books, most recently, In Deep: The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Truth About America's 'Deep State. His other books include: Beyond War: Reimagining America's Role and Ambitions in a New Middle East; A Rope and a Prayer: The Story of a Kidnapping (co-authored with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill); and Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters. David serves on the board of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
David Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is executive editor of the New Yorker‘s digital site, is moving to NBC News as senior executive editor, national security, starting next month.
This is the first major hire by Rebecca Blumenstein, who joined NBC News in January as president of editorial.
As Senior Executive Editor for National Security at NBC News, DAVID ROHDE is at the helm of vital news coverage at one of the country’s most respected media outlets. A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former war correspondent, Rohde wrestles every day with fairness, facts, propaganda, and how to respond to the polarization bankrupting our politics. Over his incredible career, including positions at The New York Times, Reuters, and more, he has covered our most pressive international issues and become one of the most respected journalists of today. His latest book, In Deep, is a “wholly satisfying read—and a necessary one for anyone wanting to understand the forces at play in our government today” (Andrea Bernstein, Peabody Award winner).
“One of the best investigative reporters of his generation. What I admire most is his fair-mindedness about pressing and controversial issues that have caused many others to lose their heads.”
—George Packer, Award-Winning Author of The Unwinding
As The New Yorker‘s Online News Director, David Rohde led a team to expand The New Yorker’s online news coverage in an effort to keep pace with Trump and his White House. He published the stories that brought down White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci and exposed a two-year criminal investigation of Donald Trump, Jr. and Ivanka Trump on fraud charges. His latest book, In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s Deep State, offers a fact-based, non-partisan investigation addressing conspiracy theories on both the left and the right regarding the existence of a “Deep State”—the unseen influences that may (or may not) be underpinning the nation’s policies and government.
As a foreign correspondent, Rohde covered the civil wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and experienced extremism first-hand. In Srebrenica, Bosnia, he discovered the mass graves of 8,000 Muslim men and boys who had been executed, was arrested at a mass grave by the Bosnian Serbs who carried out the killings, and threatened with execution himself. Rohde’s investigation of this massacre earned him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His book Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II was hailed by The New York Times as “a remarkable account, based on courageous research and admirably unbiased analysis” and by The Guardian as “essential reading” and “journalism at its committed best.”
“His work shows the broad reach and impact of good journalism, and is a shining example of what journalists can accomplish, even when working under dangerous and trying circumstances.”
—The International Press Institute
Rohde’s coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan earned him another Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting, shared with the staff at The New York Times, for their “groundbreaking, masterful coverage” of the two countries. While researching a book on Afghanistan, Rohde and two Afghan colleagues were kidnapped by a Taliban commander, held captive for seven months in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and threatened with execution before escaping. The New York Times called his book A Rope and a Prayer: The Story of a Kidnapping, co-written by Rohde and his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, “a love story, as well as a political drama” that “should be required reading.”
Rohde began his career at ABC News, then became Eastern Europe Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. For nearly fifteen years, Rohde reported for The New York Times—moving from New York Criminal Courts Reporter to Foreign Correspondent to South Asia Bureau Co-Chief to Investigative Reporter. After his tenure there, he served as a columnist for The Atlantic, and a columnist, Investigative Reporter, and National Security Investigations Editor at Reuters. His third book, Beyond War: Reimagining America’s Role and Ambitions in a New Middle East, was praised by The New York Times for exposing “the deep contradictions” in Washington’s efforts to counter terrorism.
BEYOND WAR
Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East
By David Rohde
221 pp. Viking. $27.95.
Luckily, David Rohde's new book, ''Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East,'' doesn't live up to its name. ''American influence'' is too amorphous, and the ''new Middle East'' too broad, to be convincingly ''reimagined'' in 221 pages. To his credit, Rohde, a columnist for Reuters and The Atlantic, barely tries. What he does instead is expose the deep contradiction between Washington's long experiment in slashing the civilian instruments of American power and its post-9/11 attempt to use those same instruments to remake the greater Middle East.
Rohde quotes one veteran of the United States Agency for International Development as estimating that the country today employs one-tenth as many foreign service officers as it did during the Vietnam War. Between 2001 and 2010 alone, Rohde notes, Congress cut U.S.A.I.D.'s staff by 30 percent. Over the same period, it doubled the agency's budget. The result: foreign policy by contractor. Suddenly required to spend vast sums bringing democracy and prosperity to Afghanistan and Iraq, America's emaciated civilian agencies could do little more than write huge checks to the megacontractors that grew fat off the ''war on terror.'' The contract to train the Iraqi police went to DynCorp, which, according to Rohde, enjoyed a ''cost-plus'' arrangement under which it spent as much as it wanted and charged the government a set fee above that. At one point, two government employees and one contractor in Baghdad oversaw 500 DynCorp trainers spread throughout Iraq.
Another contractor, the Academy for Educational Development, paid its president $879,530 in 2007, despite officially being a nonprofit organization. By 2010, contractors constituted 30 percent of the people working for American intelligence agencies, and private sector employees were conducting interrogations, recruiting spies and abducting suspected terrorists. In Afghanistan's Helmand Province, Rohde notes, the federal government was so strapped for staff that it hired contractors to oversee the contractors.
Rohde briefly retells the now familiar story of how the Bush administration defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- contemptuous of the Clinton administration's experiments in ''nation building'' -- spurned efforts to plan for governing Iraq after Saddam Hussein. But Rohde usefully extends this account by noting that it wasn't just Bush officials who undervalued the civilian elements of American foreign policy; Washington had been doing so for decades. Thus, even when the Obama administration took office determined to empower the State Department -- and put Richard C. Holbrooke in charge of a ''civilian surge'' in Afghanistan -- the effort failed. Part of the problem was bureaucratic infighting. But Holbrooke also found it difficult to reduce the government's reliance on large contractors: U.S.A.I.D. simply didn't have the staff.
Around this one core insight, Rohde appends chapters that read like stand-alone magazine features: on Holbrooke's final stint in government, on the Obama administration's enthusiasm for drones, on the killing of American diplomats in Benghazi. And when the finely rendered vignettes end, Rohde's conclusion feels disconnected from contemporary reality. ''Each day, 23,000 people . . . go to work at the Pentagon,'' he writes near the book's end. ''If we are serious about reimagining American influence and security, we must make equivalent investments in institutions that promote diplomacy, development and trade. . . . In its second term, the Obama administration must reprioritize those agencies, adequately fund them and support their efforts politically.'' Sure, and a manned mission to Mars would be nice too.
While Rohde's call for dramatically empowering the civilian instruments of American foreign policy represents an understandable reaction to the failures he's chronicled, it's not remotely plausible. Even the politically powerful Pentagon is set to see its funding slashed. In this budgetary environment, more U.S.A.I.D. spending would probably come at the expense of money for teachers and police officers in the United States.
Besides, while more American money to help Muslim entrepreneurs would be valuable, Rohde's own reporting suggests that the far more important dynamics in the greater Middle East have nothing to do with whether U.S.A.I.D. gets a staffing boost. In one of the book's best chapters, Rohde describes Turkey's rising cultural and economic influence in the Arab world, and notes that when it comes to advancing democracy and prosperity in the Middle East, Turkey's leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan ''has vastly more credibility in the region than the United States does.''
Erdogan, Rohde rightly acknowledges, is no paragon of liberal democracy. But the point is that in the struggle between democracy and zealotry, progress and stagnation, the real expertise, and the most important resources, will come from inside the region itself. As much as some Americans might wish for a second Marshall Plan in which American cash and brainpower help save a crucial part of the globe from tyranny, we lack both the money and the legitimacy to play that role. And to suggest that we can risks displaying the same hubris that Rohde aptly criticizes.
The lesson that Rohde teaches -- about how America's feeble civilian institutions kept it from achieving its epic post-9/11 ambitions -- is important. But over a decade later, the more basic lesson is that America's ambitions in the Middle East should have been less epic to begin with.
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PHOTO: A Blackwater helicopter flies low in Baghdad, 2005. (PHOTOGRAPH BY YURI CORTEZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE -- GETTY IMAGES)
By PETER BEINART
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The New York Times Company
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Beinart, Peter. "Send In the Contractors." The New York Times Book Review, 5 May 2013, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A328694806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8ac281b4. Accessed 26 June 2024.
David Rohde BEYOND WAR Viking (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 4, 22 ISBN: 978-0-670-02644-9
A stirring account of where American Middle East policy has gone wrong. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rohde (Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, 1997, etc.), a Reuters and Atlantic Monthly columnist, has covered the Middle East for more than a decade and survived as a Taliban hostage for seven months. His experience informs this impassioned discussion of the need to rebuild shriveled and atrophied institutions of foreign policy and diplomacy. Detailing the slashing of the State Department's budget and personnel, Rohde argues that the country has things upside down, with contractors and the military replacing diplomats. The author discusses the different ways in which this reversal came about. In Afghanistan, Rohde compares previous strategies--e.g., during the Cold War--with current strategies led by private contractors like Chemonics and DynCorp. He writes that contractor-based policies are "a symptom of the decay in American civil institutions," and he draws from the most recent Iraq war to show how policing and training of police ended up in private hands. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, profit-driven contractors grew stronger in the vacuum left by crumbling civilian institutions. In the aftermath of President Barack Obama's watershed 2009 Cairo speech on Islam and the Middle East, one investigation, conducted one year later, found that nothing had been done to transform the president's promises and initiatives into institutionalized commitments. Failures of this sort, Rohde insists, undermined the way the United States was able to address the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia. Potentials for transformation are not developed consistently, and the field is left to Islamic radicals. A clarion call for change and more--not less--engagement with Islam.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
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"David Rohde: BEYOND WAR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A318463708/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=92b9921c. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East David Rohde. Viking, $27.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-670-02644-9
A veteran journalist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and onetime Taliban captive, Rohde is no stranger to the volatile regions of Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. He draws upon his experiences (and those of his colleagues) to compile a series of prescriptions and policy alternatives for improving American relations with Muslim countries and their restive populations, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring. Foremost among his recommendations are increased trade and investment, as well as "local involvement, realistic goals, and long-term commitments." Rohde (A Rope and a Prayer, coauthor) champions the private sector as savior and envisions the U.S. State Department as a facilitator of entrepreneurship and education opportunities abroad. He also insists that America must rehabilitate its own "decayed and dysfunctional civilian agencies" (e.g., USAID), and cease to rely on awarding "megacontracts" to third parties. These recalibrations would ostensibly bolster those who "embrace democracy, modernity, and globalism" while helping to moderate Islamists, whom Rohde views as distinguishable from Salafists. Still, while advocating for more engagement, Rohde is sufficiently pragmatic to acknowledge that targeting terrorists and fostering economic growth must go hand in hand. Readers interested in American foreign policy and sustainable development will appreciate the book's substance and approach. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (Apr. 18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
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"Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East." Publishers Weekly, vol. 260, no. 5, 4 Feb. 2013, pp. 57+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A318751370/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a5e85d53. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East by DAVID ROHDE. Viking, 2013, 240 pp. $27.95.
Drawing on his experience as a New York Times correspondent, Rohde argues that U.S. policy in the Middle East should rely less on military strength and that Washington should stop throwing aid money at problems in the region; Rohde notes that at one point, the U.S. Agency for International Development was spending $340 million a month in Afghanistan alone. U.S. policy should focus more on responding to the needs of moderates in Middle Eastern societies and on promoting education, private investment, and public-private ventures that foster innovation, he argues. This is hardly the first book to call for a major recasting of U.S. policy toward the Middle East. But Rohde raises some big structural questions: What determines and sustains U.S. policy in the region? Is it realistic to expect dysfunctional public bureaucracies to foster private innovation? Why do some private actors act as parasites on public budgets, while others, such as the technologists that Rohde admires, innovate and create wealth? Rohde does not address such questions fully enough, making it difficult to evaluate his proposed paradigm shifts.
Waterbury, John
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
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Waterbury, John. "Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East." Foreign Affairs, vol. 92, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2013. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A351788732/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5c55b38a. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Rohde, David IN DEEP Norton (NonFiction None) $30.00 4, 14 ISBN: 978-1-324-00354-0
A two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist attempts “to answer the question of whether a ‘deep state’ exists in America.”
Rodhe, an executive editor of the New Yorker website, examines where the conspiratorial term originated and how the Trump administration has consistently undermined checks-and-balances efforts in order to create its own “parallel, shadow government.” The term, coined by Peter Dale Scott in The Road to 9/11 (2007) to designate nefarious plans by foreign authoritative governments, was appropriated by Trump and associates to mean underhanded attempts by a “policy elite” (primarily the State Department, FBI, and CIA) to sabotage and delegitimize his election and government. Is there really a deep state, or is it an effort by the Trump administration to spread disinformation and distrust of government, a tactic that has been effective in shoring up his conservative base? Rohde agrees that Americans are justified in distrusting the government during periods of scandal and outrageous misconduct, and the author systematically walks through those cases, chronicling violations of citizens’ privacy, from the Cold War to Watergate to trumped-up evidence for Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. On one hand, Rohde continually returns to the success of the Church Committee’s (1975) unprecedented bipartisan efforts to expose early governmental abuses and suggest recommendations that, over time, created new congressional intelligence committees to monitor and check the CIA and other agencies. On the other hand, the author reveals how the “imperial presidency,” thwarted during the Nixon administration, has steadily creeped back in place thanks to work by Attorney General William Barr and others, causing a veritable “collapse of Congressional oversight” that found its apotheosis in the impeachment and acquittal of Trump. Throughout his immaculately researched work, Rohde inserts the career stories of “good civil servants,” including many of the officials who testified in the impeachment hearings. As this revelatory book shows, the deep state, which now incorporates such nonelected loyalists as Rudy Giuliani, Sean Hannity, and Barr, has become the government itself.
A vital investigation for this election year—and far beyond.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Rohde, David: IN DEEP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A620268231/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=742161be. Accessed 26 June 2024.
N DEEPThe FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America's ''Deep State''By David Rohde
The specter of a ''deep state'' has served as a useful scapegoat in Donald Trump's presidency, the alleged locus of resistance to his reign. Early on in his book ''In Deep,'' David Rohde, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, asks ''whether a 'deep state' exists in America.'' At the start of his final chapter, he concludes, ''There is no 'deep state.''' But in the intervening pages, he raises more questions than he answers.
He begins with a brisk history of the phrase, which is rooted in Egypt and Turkey, where the military ran everything and nipped the slightest buds of democratic reform. The former Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott first applied it to American military and intelligence elites, in a book entitled ''The Road to 9/11.'' The alt-right adopted it in December 2016, after an anonymous author, using the pen name Virgil, wrote ''The Deep State vs. Donald Trump,'' a 4,000-word article in Breitbart News. Steve Bannon had been the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and became Trump's chief strategist. Virgil broadened the term to encompass ''the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats and plutocrats that likes things just the way they are'' -- including the ''highly politicized'' intelligence agencies and the ''liberal apparatchiks'' installed by President Barack Obama -- who were now all engaged in ''a great power struggle'' with the newly elected president. Trump himself first invoked the term, Rohde reports, on June 16, 2017. He was retweeting a post by Sean Hannity, his favorite Fox News host, who had hawked a segment on his show that night on the ties between the ''deep state'' and the news media.
Did Trump and Bannon -- does anyone in power -- believe this conspiracy theory? Rohde goes back and forth on the question. He notes in passing (more detail would have been welcome) that Bannon fed the idea to Trump as a way of getting him to ''distrust the advice of career government officials who opposed Bannon's policy goals.'' Meanwhile, Trump soon realized its power as a narrative device, invoking it last year at least 23 times. But Rohde also writes that, especially during Robert Mueller's probe of his ties with Russia, Trump came to believe that ''a cabal of Democrats and 'deep state' members were trying to force him from power.''
At times, Rohde suggests there is a deep state, though he calls it ''institutional government,'' a term he chose ''for its relative neutrality.'' Its denizens don't form ''an organized plot,'' but they do exhibit ''bias, caution and turf consciousness.'' And, he writes, ''the Justice Department and the F.B.I. and senior intelligence officials proved to be the most formidable resistance'' the administration would encounter from within the federal government, initiating a ''struggle for power that would define Trump's presidency.'' Notice: Rohde isn't paraphrasing Trump's point of view here; he's describing what he sees as an objective situation.
So, is there a deep state, though one with a more neutral name and less cabalistic motives than the conspiracy theorists portray?
Much of the book charts the history of congressional oversight over the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., beginning, in 1975, with the committee chaired by Senator Frank Church. Its hearings and subsequent report unveiled a long and gruesome string of assassinations, wiretaps and assorted skulduggery -- after which Congress passed laws restricting these practices. Rohde appraises subsequent presidents, after Richard Nixon, by how faithfully they held to these Church-era reforms.
He seems to suggest, though he never outright claims, that the reforms muzzled what at least used to be a deep state. However, as countless books have documented, the C.I.A., far from being a ''rogue elephant'' (as Church described it), was, for the most part, executing the top-secret orders of the presidents it served. For instance, Operation Mongoose, the C.I.A.'s bungled plot to kill Fidel Castro, was authorized by President John Kennedy and run by his brother Robert, the attorney general -- a fact that Church played down and Rohde doesn't mention.
Some of the book's most fascinating passages trace the rise of William Barr, Trump's attorney general, from his time as a C.I.A. intern to clerking for a federal judge who ruled that Nixon had no obligation to turn over the White House tapes (a position that the Supreme Court would overrule unanimously), to serving as a legal assistant in Ronald Reagan's White House -- all of which hardened his commitment to a doctrine of presidential power and downgrading the role of Congress. Rohde highlights Barr's activism, along with a small group of other conservative lawyers, in the Federalist Society and the Catholic Information Center, which now exercise enormous influence. (The five conservative Supreme Court justices have all been members of the Federalist Society, whose recommendations have also shaped Trump's selections of lower-court judges.)
The tale of these groups is worth an entire book. But are they part of a new ''deep state''? Rohde declares that they are, tossing in Trump's relationship with Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity to boot. At the end of the book, he concludes, ''Trump is creating a parallel, shadow government filled with like-minded loyalists, without transparency, democratic norms or public processes -- a 'deep state' of its own.'' It's a clever punchline, but it's wrong. Trump and his team are the opposite of a deep state. They're operating in the open, running the top layer of the executive branch while decimating and dissing the denizens of the permanent bureaucracy in order to accomplish, as Bannon once put it, ''the destruction of the administrative state.'' And, unlike a deep state (whether mythological or real), after Trump leaves office they'll be swept away.
Fred Kaplan is Slate's War Stories columnist and the author of ''The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War.'' IN DEEP The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America's ''Deep State'' By David Rohde Illustrated. 352 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $30.
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PHOTO: Steve Bannon, 2019. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JEENAH MOON/REUTERS.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The New York Times Company
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Kaplan, Fred. "Who's Running the Government?" The New York Times Book Review, 3 May 2020, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622599097/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3e09403c. Accessed 26 June 2024.
To hear President Trump's supporters tell it, there is a secret army of malcontents lurking deep within the bowels of government whose goal is to drive Trump from office. Think Eisenhower's military industrial complex, but on steroids. It is referred to as the "deep state," and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and investigative journalist David Rohde went out in search of it. The result is a fascinating new book called "In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America's 'Deep State.'"
In Rohde's account, Trump became the first American president to apply the term "deep state" to the U.S. government, in 2017. As often seems to happen these days, it began with an accusation by retweet. The president forwarded to his 60 million followers a post by Fox News host Sean Hannity, in which Hannity accused the deep state of trying to reverse the 2016 election. From that moment on, the term became "part of the Trumpian lexicon, along with 'witch hunt' and 'fake news,'" Rohde writes. "President Trump himself increasingly invokes the term. In 2019, Trump used the phrase as at least 23 times, twice the number he did in 2018."
To be sure, Trump came to office primed to distrust the Washington establishment. He has a deep suspicion of civil servants held over from previous administrations, convinced that they are part of a vast Never Trump conspiracy. No less contentious was his relationship with the intelligence community and the FBI, which first raised concerns about his campaign's links to Russia. No one, it appears, was immune from his suspicion.
Even Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-diseases expert, who has become America's Doctor in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, has been accused of being a deep state actor. The notion went viral when Fauci put his hand in front of his face in a gesture interpreted as disbelief after the president referred to the State Department as "the Deep State Department." Fauci then found himself in a fantastical narrative in which he was accused of exaggerating the virus's threat to damage the economy and hurt the president's reelection chances. (The doctor's security detail has since been beefed up.)
How did we get here?
The idea of the deep state, Rohde writes, is inextricably linked to a particular view of presidential power. There is a contingent of conservatives who have long believed "that a powerful presidency, unhindered by aggressive oversight from Congress and the courts, was necessary in order to defend the country," Rohde writes. "Their maximalist view of executive power remained largely on the fringes of American politics. It would gain greater currency during the Reagan administration, after the 9/11 attacks, and unexpectedly, when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 -- forty years after the Church Committee completed its work." (That committee had investigated the misdeeds of the FBI and the CIA in the late '60s and had helped produce the reforms establishing congressional oversight of the agencies.)
The term "deep state" first appeared in the United States in a 2007 book, "The Road to 9/11," by Peter Dale Scott. Scott, a retired University of California at Berkeley professor, accused the U.S. military of fueling conflict both inside and outside the country from the Cold War right up until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In that context, the idea seemed to be fodder for a reasonable political discussion. It took conservative talk radio, Rohde writes, to add toxicity.
While promoting the book, Scott became an occasional guest on Alex Jones's far-right radio program, and it was there that his discussion of the deep state began to be seen through a more conspiratorial lens. Rohde interviewed Scott and learned that "he regretted appearing on the show and was angered by how Jones and his audience have used the concept of a 'deep state.'" Scott told Rohde, "They have vulgarized the term."
The concept of the deep state popped up again in a Breitbart News article titled "The Deep State vs. Donald Trump," shortly before Trump took office, Rohde reports. Writing under the pseudonym "Virgil," the unnamed author defined the "'deep state' as all federal employees as well as their political supporters, the policy elite (the 'chattering class') and the mainstream media," Rohde records, adding that the very idea that there is some secretive club working the levers of power taps into "Americans' long-standing suspicions of government, particularly among conservatives."
To explain how this came to be, Rohde begins with the Church Committee investigations of CIA and FBI overreach in the wake of Watergate. What the bipartisan committee found was that the two had been illegally investigating Americans for years.
"In a society that declared itself exceptional, democratic, and free, the violations of privacy and liberty were stunning," Rohde writes. "The CIA secretly opened and photographed nearly a half-million letters mailed between private citizens in the United States, including the personal correspondence of John Steinbeck, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon. Agency operatives had secretly funded or infiltrated student groups, university centers, and foundations across the United States."
The committee concluded that the abuses weren't the work of a few rogue officers -- they were institutional. Around this same time, a promising young student named William Barr had just graduated from Columbia University in New York and had joined the CIA as an intelligence analyst. He "questioned the aggressiveness of the congressional oversight," Rohde writes, "later saying that the Church Committee delivered 'body blows' to the agency."
Rohde contends that this marked the beginning of Barr's antipathy for congressional oversight, which "he saw as excessive, inappropriate and, at times, comical. He told friends that he was appalled by the mediocrity of some members of Congress and the stupidity of their questions," Rohde writes. "It was the first round in a lifelong war that Barr would wage against congressional oversight. For the next forty years, Barr would work to strengthen the power of the president."
"In Deep" tracks Barr's Zelig-like presence at key moments of executive power flexing. When President George H.W. Bush decided to send troops to Panama to arrest President Manuel Noriega, Barr was head of the Justice Department's office of legal counsel. He issued a legal opinion finding that a president has an "inherent constitutional authority" to order the FBI to round up people in foreign countries.
"The opinion reversed an earlier Justice Department policy that the president lacked such authority and expanded executive branch power," Rohde writes. "After seeking refuge in the Vatican diplomatic mission in Panama, Noriega was arrested by FBI agents and later tried and imprisoned in the United States. After 9/11, the seizure of foreign nationals overseas by the United States would be vastly expanded."
For Rohde this is one part of the deep state equation. To go mainstream, the idea needed something less intellectual -- it needed a story line, ideally a conspiracy, and it found one in two lethal confrontations between federal agents and heavily armed civilians in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Tex.
In the waning days of the Bush administration, in August 1992, federal marshals sought the arrest of a white supremacist named Randy Weaver, who was wanted for selling illegal sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent. Weaver lived with his family in a remote cabin on Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho. An FBI sniper ended up killing a Weaver family friend and Weaver's wife, Vicki.
Just months later, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) surrounded a compound near Waco owned by the Branch Davidians, a religious cult. The leader of the group, David Koresh, was said to be illegally stockpiling weapons. When agents went to arrest him, he resisted, and a five-hour gun battle ensued.
Attorney General Janet Reno, eager to avoid a repeat of Ruby Ridge, told the FBI to end the standoff peacefully. That's not what happened. After seven weeks of fruitless negotiations, "federal agents drove tanks and armored vehicles up to the sprawling complex, knocked holes in its walls and fired more than 300 tear-gas canisters inside it," Rohde recounts. "Four hours after the operations began, fires broke out at three locations inside the structure. On live national television, as the prairie wind stoked the flames, the complex burned to the ground."
Seventy-six Branch Davidians, including children, died in the fire. Twenty of them, including Koresh and several children, died of gunshot wounds to the head. Although investigations later found that Koresh and his followers had set the fires, Rohde writes, conspiracy theories began to fill in the gaps. The National Rifle Association called ATF agents "armed terrorists." Steve Stockman, a Republican congressman from Texas, wrote an article in Guns & Ammo magazine that claimed the Clinton administration had staged the whole standoff to drum up support for the 1994 assault weapons ban. Militia groups started rumors that federal agents had intentionally killed children at Waco. There was a video, based on doctored footage, suggesting that the FBI armored vehicles had attacked the compound with flamethrowers.
"Twenty years after the Church reforms, the oversight mechanisms designed to create public trust and transparency in government -- congressional hearings, criminal trials by juries, and news media reporting -- were increasingly dismissed by large parts of the American public," Rohde laments, adding that the growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans provided a perverse incentive to emphasize conspiracy theories; it allowed politicians to portray their opponents as extremists.
Which brings us back full circle to the deep state in the age of Trump, from the "birther movement" to conspiracy theories about Benghazi and authoritarianism and coverups.
Rohde takes readers through Trump's uncanny ability to weaponize information: the name-calling, the attacks on the media, the dystopian inaugural speech, the demands of loyalty, the hollowing-out of government institutions large and small, the questioning of intelligence, the fanning of divisions in the military, and finally the allegations that the Obama administration spied on his campaign.
A former official told Rohde that Stephen Bannon specifically fed Trump conspiracy theories "to get the president to distrust the advice of career government officials who opposed Bannon's policy goals."
With all his reporting and research, Rohde comes to a conclusion that, borrowing slightly from W.C. Fields, news of the deep state has been greatly exaggerated. "Every modern American president has expressed distrust of career government officials in Washington," he notes early in the book. "But no president had attacked the motives of career government officials as publicly or angrily as Trump. No president has so openly trafficked in conspiracy theories for political gain."
Which ultimately brings us to where we are today -- months into a pandemic with a faltering world economy and an uncertain future. After reading "In Deep," one can't help wondering how much Trump's suspicion of and disdain for expertise and experience (and the so-called "policy elite") has affected his response to the coronavirus. The sad policy question is: How many lives have been lost because of his belief in the deep state?
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Washington Post
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Temple-Raston, Dina. "The 'deep state': From scholarly critique to toxic conspiracy theory." Washingtonpost.com, 1 May 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622544684/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7fd8009. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Rohde, David WHERE TYRANNY BEGINS Norton (NonFiction None) $29.99 8, 27 ISBN: 9780393881967
A meticulous chronicle of the excruciating details of the battles between the Trump presidency and the Department of Justice.
In a hard-hitting book characterized by careful research and documentation, two-time Pulitzer winner Rohde, author of In Deep and Endgame, delineates how the Trump White House violated well-established post-Watergate norms about judicial conduct, upending and devaluing the work of the DOJ. The trajectory of the successful attempts to sway judicial philosophy started in the first week of Trump's presidency, as he instituted the Muslim travel ban, an executive decision that went straight to the courts. Subsequently, the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist--caught lying about meeting a Russian ambassador when he was running Trump's campaign--recused himself from running the investigation into Russian interference, a monumental decision that would lead to Trump turning against him. After Trump fired FBI director James Comey, deputy AG Rod Rosenstein felt compelled to choose the highly revered former FBI director Robert Mueller to run the special counsel on Russia. However, Trump's repeated attacks on the department and its officials weakened the ability of the special counsel team to make its case to the public. Moreover, the new AG, William Barr, publicly misrepresented Mueller's conclusion two years later as proving there was "no collusion" with the Russians, when Mueller's report was actually more damning. The new scandals over the phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, along with the investigation into Hunter Biden and the commuting of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn's sentences, all resulted in "myriad Justice Department and post-Watergate norms shredded by Trump and Barr with seemingly little political consequence." The resulting situation, Rohde argues convincingly, cannot be rectified by the cautious proceedings of Biden's AG, Merrick Garland.
A cautionary, relevant study of systematic executive bullying that has cast deep skepticism on law enforcement in America.
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"Rohde, David: WHERE TYRANNY BEGINS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795674017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=98aff790. Accessed 26 June 2024.