Paul Manafort and How the Swamp Was Made
00:30:
(Matt Thompson)
He doesn't exactly have a household name.
00:32:
(Matt Thompson)
In fact, until he became head of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, most Americans had probably never heard of Paul Manafort.
00:40:
(Matt Thompson)
Now, he's been indicted on charges of conspiracy and money laundering by the special counsel Robert Mueller.
00:46:
(Matt Thompson)
What does the rise and fall of Paul Manafort reveal about corruption around the world?
00:51:
(Matt Thompson)
And what will it mean for the White House?
00:54:
(Matt Thompson)
This is Radio Atlantic.
01:08:
(Matt Thompson)
Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.
01:12:
(Matt Thompson)
And with me in the studio in D.C. today is Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
01:17:
(Matt Thompson)
Hello, Jeffrey.
01:17:
(Matt Thompson)
Hi, Matt.
01:19:
(Matt Thompson)
And with both of us today is Franklin Foer, author of The Atlantic's March 2018 cover story, The Plot Against America.
01:32:
(Matt Thompson)
About Paul Manafort.
01:34:
(Matt Thompson)
Frank, thanks for joining us.
01:36:
(Franklin Foer)
Honored to be with you.
01:37:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Are you really honored?
01:39:
(Franklin Foer)
Truly honored.
01:40:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Truly.
01:40:
(Franklin Foer)
Not just superficially.
01:41:
(Franklin Foer)
Really honored.
01:42:
(Franklin Foer)
In that fake sort of way that I'm normally honored.
01:44:
(Franklin Foer)
All right.
01:44:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The Washington way.
01:46:
(Franklin Foer)
No, no, no.
01:46:
(Matt Thompson)
We'll get to that.
01:47:
(Franklin Foer)
This is beyond Washington honored.
01:49:
(Franklin Foer)
All right.
01:49:
(Franklin Foer)
We'll get to that.
01:50:
(Matt Thompson)
Honored to have you at the table.
01:52:
(Matt Thompson)
Alex Wagner, our co-host, is off gallivanting this week but will be back with us again next week.
01:57:
(Matt Thompson)
Frank, I want to start with a passage that appears deep in your story but is something of a thesis of the story.
02:05:
(Matt Thompson)
Quote,
02:09:
(Matt Thompson)
We live in a world of smash-and-grab fortunes amassed through political connections and outright theft.
02:14:
(Matt Thompson)
Paul Manafort, over the course of his career, was a great normalizer of corruption.
02:19:
(Matt Thompson)
Helping elect Donald Trump in so many ways represents the culmination of Paul Manafort's work.
02:25:
(Matt Thompson)
What is Paul Manafort's work?
02:28:
(Matt Thompson)
So one of the things that emerges from your story is that Paul Manafort is a guy whose career can't exactly be neatly placed on a LinkedIn profile.
02:38:
(Matt Thompson)
He has had different types of jobs than your typical guy.
02:41:
(Matt Thompson)
And the type of work that he does is kind of hard to describe.
02:46:
(Matt Thompson)
So in your words, Frank, having dived into this guy's history, what is Paul Manafort good at?
02:53:
(Franklin Foer)
So Paul Manafort began as a political consultant, as a strategist.
02:58:
(Franklin Foer)
He worked for Gerald Ford.
03:00:
(Franklin Foer)
He worked for Ronald Reagan.
03:02:
(Franklin Foer)
And after he had this experience, he set up a firm in Washington, D.C., where he started out intending to help people get help Republicans get elected to political office.
03:12:
(Franklin Foer)
But once he arrived in Washington, he just started getting almost bombarded with phone calls from corporations who said, you know what, can you help us lobby on Capitol Hill?
03:22:
(Franklin Foer)
And so his consulting firm became a lobbying firm.
03:26:
(Franklin Foer)
And over time, he morphed into becoming this substantial player in Washington and Republican politics and then actually in global politics.
03:37:
(Franklin Foer)
And there's this theme that runs through all these different iterations of Paul Manafort, which is that his job is to help people.
03:45:
(Franklin Foer)
I mean, there's this kind of run of the mill thing that consultants and lobbyists do, which is that they try to help their clients look good.
03:52:
(Franklin Foer)
Now, Paul Manafort happened to see the tremendous business opportunity that lies with helping not just corporations look good and in turn get goodies from the Capitol, but there were all these figures around the world who
04:09:
(Franklin Foer)
who had their own political and business reasons for improving their image.
04:15:
(Franklin Foer)
And they happened to be, a lot of them, goons, authoritarian dictators, oligarchs.
04:21:
(Franklin Foer)
And they needed to improve their image in Washington in order to...
04:26:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah.
04:44:
(Franklin Foer)
But in some ways, the laundering of reputation is its own big parallel business that in order to function in this world, you can't be a pariah.
04:56:
(Franklin Foer)
You need somebody like Paul Manafort to help reshape your image so that you become a passable member of global society.
05:03:
(Franklin Foer)
And that helps your business.
05:05:
(Franklin Foer)
It's a prerequisite for your business, in fact.
05:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Hmm.
05:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I will note and maybe we can come back to this that Paul Manafort is not necessarily a guy who's mastered his own image in public.
05:16:
(Franklin Foer)
No, it's a bitter irony.
05:17:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's what we call a bitter irony.
05:19:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But come back to this point about dictators.
05:21:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Was he the first person to do this in Washington or was he just the best?
05:27:
(Franklin Foer)
So starting in the 1970s, there were a few pioneers who had started to work in this field.
05:35:
(Franklin Foer)
There was a company called Sawyer Miller that had begun to work, take the techniques of American political consulting and export them to the rest of the world.
05:44:
(Franklin Foer)
But what Paul Manafort did was...
05:46:
(Franklin Foer)
He offered this full service shop to dictators where he said, you know, I'm not going to just help you run Potemkin elections in your own country.
05:55:
(Franklin Foer)
I'm not going to help you just lobby for dollars in Washington.
05:59:
(Franklin Foer)
I'm going to give you the full suite of services and I'm going to become in a way your consigliere.
06:05:
(Franklin Foer)
Why wasn't this illegal?
06:07:
(Franklin Foer)
But why would it be illegal?
06:09:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Why wouldn't it be illegal?
06:11:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
No, but, I mean, it's...
06:12:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's, I mean, an American...
06:14:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I mean, think about it.
06:15:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I mean, maybe you're so part of the swamp that you don't see how gross it is.
06:19:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But, I mean, does a swamp creature know he's in a swamp?
06:22:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Does a fish know he's in water?
06:24:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We're all in the Watergate in D.C. We're literally in the Watergate right now taping this, by the way.
06:30:
(Franklin Foer)
No, no, no.
06:30:
(Franklin Foer)
I'm getting paid by the hour, right?
06:31:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I'm asking a faux-naive question.
06:33:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But...
06:35:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
How did it come to pass that American political consultants affiliated with particular American political parties got to do flack work for pay for foreign dictators?
06:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
There has to be some law that precluded that.
06:50:
(Franklin Foer)
Well, there's a law that aimed to control it, which is the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which was passed on the eve of World War II where there was this publicist called Ivy Dye who got hired by a German company to try to improve the Third Reich's image.
07:07:
(Franklin Foer)
And so our response to that –
07:09:
(Franklin Foer)
That's a task.
07:17:
(Franklin Foer)
We've passed Holocaust Remembrance Day.
07:18:
(Franklin Foer)
Right, right, right.
07:19:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
No, that's the hardest job in PR right there.
07:22:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah, no.
07:23:
(Franklin Foer)
And so what we said was if you're going to represent a foreign government, you have to make that known.
07:30:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Okay, but what I'm saying is what happened in the – why did the system break down to the point where Congress, president at the time, didn't say –
07:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Wait, this should simply be illegal.
07:40:
(Matt Thompson)
This is crazy, right?
07:41:
(Matt Thompson)
This is one of the things that emerges from your story, Frank, which is the line between illegal corruption and just indecent behavior.
07:52:
(Franklin Foer)
And corruption.
07:52:
(Franklin Foer)
And just like indecent behavior.
07:54:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah, corruption.
07:55:
(Franklin Foer)
Okay, so –
07:56:
(Franklin Foer)
First of all, I think we need to say that this was actually one of the nightmares of of the founders that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, they lost a lot of sleep about the idea that foreign governments would be able to get influence in the democracy.
08:11:
(Franklin Foer)
And so foreign corruption was something that they wrote that they wrote about or they thought about.
08:16:
(Franklin Foer)
They didn't necessarily enshrine anything specific about it within the Constitution.
08:22:
(Franklin Foer)
But it was – I mean we're in this age where I think we have this new appreciation for democratic norms and for the culture of a democracy.
08:34:
(Franklin Foer)
And so something like working for a foreign dictator is something that would probably strike most people within –
08:43:
(Franklin Foer)
our society as being horrific and so that it didn't happen.
08:48:
(Franklin Foer)
And the people who did it were extreme outliers.
08:51:
(Franklin Foer)
And what happens is, is that the system starts to break down piece by piece over time.
08:56:
(Franklin Foer)
And if we follow the trajectory of somebody like Paul Manafort, you can see the ways in which
09:00:
(Franklin Foer)
He understood the weaknesses in our system of norms and that you could just keep pushing the envelope.
09:06:
(Franklin Foer)
And so something that had been beyond the pale, you kind of suddenly make that an acceptable business practice and you proceed to the next – to destroy the next norm and make that an acceptable business practice.
09:19:
(Matt Thompson)
I mean this is what I was going to say.
09:20:
(Matt Thompson)
What emerges from your story is this picture of a guy who among his gifts, among his unique abilities –
09:26:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
09:41:
(Franklin Foer)
Right.
09:41:
(Franklin Foer)
I mean, this is – and in other fields, if you're in other fields, you consider that innovation and creative destruction.
09:50:
(Franklin Foer)
But when you're in the field of influencing the U.S. government, it just becomes destruction.
09:55:
(Franklin Foer)
So a specific question for you, Frank.
09:58:
(Matt Thompson)
If I were to ask you to name – to go back to Paul Manafort's LinkedIn profile for a second, who do you imagine –
10:05:
(Matt Thompson)
Paul Manafort might list first among his references, if I were to check his references as a would-be, as a dictator who wanted to get his reputation laundered.
10:15:
(Matt Thompson)
Who do you think I would be pointed to first?
10:18:
(Franklin Foer)
Well, so I think his greatest political project was the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych.
10:25:
(Franklin Foer)
And that project is the one that he would point to because it was the one that he was most personally invested in.
10:32:
(Franklin Foer)
He spent almost 10 years working in Kiev,
10:35:
(Franklin Foer)
With his other clients, he was always working for multiple dictators, let's say, at any given moment.
10:41:
(Franklin Foer)
But starting in 2004, after the Orange Revolution, when he first landed in Kiev, his client list shrunk very, very quickly to essentially this guy, Viktor Yanukovych, and the clique of oligarchs who surrounded him.
10:57:
(Franklin Foer)
Mm-hmm.
10:58:
(Franklin Foer)
And it was also, I think, the political project that he was most invested in personally because he took a political party and a figure who had been discredited.
11:08:
(Franklin Foer)
In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych rigged an election for the presidency of Ukraine.
11:14:
(Franklin Foer)
And then there was a revolution aimed at undoing that election, which was the Orange Revolution.
11:19:
(Franklin Foer)
And in that campaign, if you'll remember, his primary political opponent was poisoned with dioxin.
11:25:
(Franklin Foer)
Mm-hmm.
11:25:
(Franklin Foer)
So he'd rigged an election, he'd poisoned an opponent, and a revolution had risen up against him and he was sent into self-imposed exile.
11:34:
(Franklin Foer)
And Manafort was able to take this ball of muck and reshape it as a plausible political figure.
11:42:
(Franklin Foer)
And he got paid gobs of money, tens of millions of dollars to do it.
11:48:
(Franklin Foer)
And it worked.
11:49:
(Franklin Foer)
He was able to get this guy to return from the political dead to become president of Ukraine in 2010.
11:56:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I want to come to the point in this story where Manafort meets Trump, that fateful moment, at least for Manafort, that fateful moment.
12:04:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But...
12:05:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I'm still confused by something about Manafort.
12:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
How could someone who's so good at his job be so bad at his job?
12:12:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Not making a moral observation about this, but this is a guy who could take a ball of muck or however you just called it and turn him into a winning candidate.
12:22:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Why is his life come to this point?
12:26:
(Franklin Foer)
Well, first of all, when you're driven by desperation, you oftentimes are unable to understand your own political calculus.
12:35:
(Franklin Foer)
Tell me about it.
12:35:
(Franklin Foer)
I live that here.
12:36:
(Franklin Foer)
I know.
12:37:
(Franklin Foer)
I noticed.
12:37:
(Franklin Foer)
I noticed.
12:38:
(Franklin Foer)
I noticed.
12:39:
(Franklin Foer)
So in 2015, Paul Manafort's life was a mess.
12:45:
(Franklin Foer)
And so financially, it was a mess because he'd lost his primary client, this this president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, because he was swept out in a revolution.
12:56:
(Franklin Foer)
And so Manafort didn't have he tumbled very far, very fast professionally.
13:02:
(Franklin Foer)
He lost his status.
13:05:
(Franklin Foer)
His ego had taken a hit.
13:06:
(Franklin Foer)
As I said, financially, he'd taken a hit so much so that his cash became tight.
13:12:
(Franklin Foer)
He had to take out all sorts of absurd loans from banks where he was actually lying to the banks in order to get more money from them.
13:19:
(Franklin Foer)
He had a very expensive lifestyle, which –
13:22:
(Franklin Foer)
became very difficult to finance um his own daughter's wedding um was something that he struggled to pay for and eliminated the after being a multi-multi-millionaire yeah after after being a multi-multi-millionaire and then his personal life collapsed because he'd been having an affair and he got caught in the affair he continued with the affair and then got caught again and so his marriage was in a state of distress his kids hated him
13:47:
(Franklin Foer)
And he was essentially forced to check himself into a clinic in Arizona to recover from his breakdown.
13:54:
(Franklin Foer)
So the guy who experiences that many gut punches, who makes that many mistakes, who's really who has reasons to doubt himself and his worth in the world is not going to be the person who's going to manage their own image in an expert sort of way.
14:10:
(Franklin Foer)
And so he was desperate when he came to the Trump campaign and he took risks that he wouldn't have taken under normal circumstances.
14:17:
(Matt Thompson)
And I imagine if part of the reputation that you're creating is your willingness to transgress boundaries that others might shy away from, then creating that type of a reputation is at odds with creating a sort of public image of being a sterling man of character and decency.
14:34:
(Franklin Foer)
Totally.
14:34:
(Franklin Foer)
That's right.
14:35:
(Franklin Foer)
And there's this one other part of the Manafort persona, which is that one of the reasons he was attracted to these dictators and to these foreign assignments and loved traveling around the world is that he had this buccaneering sense of adventurousness.
14:48:
(Franklin Foer)
And he also had a sense, as you're describing, of –
14:53:
(Franklin Foer)
of immunity from the laws of gravity.
14:56:
(Franklin Foer)
And so nobody had ever busted him ever before, really, in a meaningful sort of way for the transgressive acts that he committed.
15:05:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Okay, nobody's ever, nobody busted him, but...
15:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
acknowledging that the trump campaign was non-traditional from the start uh still this guy washes up suggested as the campaign chairman nobody said wait a second i just heard that his life has completely gone to hell and and all of the things that you report uh you're a great reporter but these things are you could find out these things yeah yeah well
15:32:
(Franklin Foer)
You actually couldn't because he's in some ways a reserved and introspective figure.
15:39:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's hard to imagine him that way because – If he came to you for a job, you would call all of your mutual friends and say, well, what do you think of Paul?
15:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Somebody would have said things are kind of sideways.
15:48:
(Franklin Foer)
No, but if you have a facade of success and you're able to maintain that facade of success with your –
15:54:
(Franklin Foer)
your house in the Hamptons and Palm Beach and the cars and all these things, it's not necessarily easy to see the signs of decay.
16:03:
(Franklin Foer)
And especially not since he'd been in Ukraine for 10 years.
16:07:
(Franklin Foer)
And so people kind of lost track of him.
16:09:
(Franklin Foer)
And so even his close friends didn't really fully understand what was happening in his life.
16:14:
(Matt Thompson)
And you write in the piece, quote, the sad truth is that all of the damning information contained within special counsel Bob Mueller's indictment would have remained submerged if Manafort had withstood the temptation to seek out a role in Trump's campaign.
16:29:
(Matt Thompson)
Even if his record had become known, it would have felt unexceptional.
16:33:
(Matt Thompson)
Manafort's misdeed in our current era would not have seemed so inconsistent with the run of global play.
16:38:
(Matt Thompson)
So there's a way in which the –
16:40:
(Matt Thompson)
But ascending to the top of the Trump campaign was itself something of an undoing.
16:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Manafort is Icarus and Trump is the sun.
16:49:
(Franklin Foer)
That's right.
16:49:
(Franklin Foer)
And Trump kind of proves the point, too, right, which is that he lives in a world where he's gotten away with a lot of things over the course of his career and never really paid a political price for them.
16:59:
(Franklin Foer)
And I mean, Trump's sins are a lot more surface than I think Trump's.
17:02:
(Franklin Foer)
some of Manafort's sins were, that Manafort was a mercenary and everybody knew that he was a mercenary.
17:07:
(Franklin Foer)
They knew that he worked for terrible people.
17:09:
(Franklin Foer)
They knew that he'd pushed the bounds of influence peddling.
17:13:
(Franklin Foer)
But that's kind of Washington, right?
17:15:
(Franklin Foer)
Washington is a place filled with mercenaries.
17:17:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Well, go to this large point because one of the great aspects of this piece that's out on our cover now is that it's not just about Paul Manafort.
17:27:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's about a city and a culture that –
17:30:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
rewarded a person with the character and behavior of Paul Manafort.
17:36:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Was it always true that, to borrow the phrase, that this place is a swamp, or have we just gradually normalized to worse and worse behavior?
17:46:
(Franklin Foer)
I think both are true, that the place has always been a swamp.
17:50:
(Franklin Foer)
There have always been seedy creatures here.
17:52:
(Franklin Foer)
There have always been people who've bought influence.
17:55:
(Franklin Foer)
There have always been businesses that have been successful in buying influence.
17:59:
(Franklin Foer)
But I think that there was this period that began with the progressive era and extended up through the 70s and early 80s.
18:07:
(Franklin Foer)
where business, which had kind of – the emergence of these corporations who thought of themselves as being efficient, scientific.
18:17:
(Franklin Foer)
There was this political culture that had emerged in Washington over time that tried to view the practice of policy and government as something that should be immune from the interests and from lobbying.
18:32:
(Franklin Foer)
And so you head into the post-war period.
18:37:
(Franklin Foer)
a fairly non-existent business in Washington.
18:41:
(Franklin Foer)
There were corporations who had offices in D.C., and a lot of times they'd hire former congressmen to look after their concerns in Washington.
18:50:
(Franklin Foer)
But you didn't have this highly professionalized mercenary system, which is the system that Manafort, in a
19:00:
(Franklin Foer)
helped create in the 1980s.
19:02:
(Franklin Foer)
And so you have a breakdown, again, to go back to our norm core theme, that you had norms and those norms started to collapse.
19:12:
(Franklin Foer)
Business had to actually be persuaded that it was in their interest to ramp up in Washington.
19:18:
(Franklin Foer)
Business came to conclude that
19:20:
(Franklin Foer)
Being in Washington wasn't contrary to the national interest.
19:24:
(Franklin Foer)
And it wasn't even a defensive move that the government represented a business opportunity that they could exploit the state in order to enhance their profits.
19:33:
(Franklin Foer)
And Manafort, again, was one of these figures who helped persuade business that that was the proper thing to do.
19:39:
(Matt Thompson)
So make that concrete for me for a second, Frank.
19:41:
(Matt Thompson)
It's the mid 80s.
19:43:
(Matt Thompson)
Yeah.
19:43:
(Matt Thompson)
You are working for Black Manafort and Stone.
19:47:
(Matt Thompson)
And I walk in, I've got a pot of money, and I want you to help me.
19:52:
(Matt Thompson)
What can your firm do for me?
19:54:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The prime minister of Podcastistan.
19:56:
(Matt Thompson)
I'm the prime minister of what will become one day, the empire of Podcastistan.
20:02:
(Matt Thompson)
And I've done some misdeeds, perhaps.
20:06:
(Matt Thompson)
We won't talk about them.
20:07:
(Matt Thompson)
But you have some services to offer.
20:10:
(Matt Thompson)
What can you do for me that all these other firms lining K Street won't?
20:15:
(Franklin Foer)
Well, first of all, because of my connections to the Reagan administration, my ample connections to the Reagan administration, I can help you with whatever issue you have with the U.S. government.
20:26:
(Franklin Foer)
If there's any issue with your entourage getting into this country, they need visas.
20:31:
(Franklin Foer)
We can take care of that in a second.
20:33:
(Franklin Foer)
I know that you want a new batch of arms in order to crush the insurgency in your country.
20:39:
(Franklin Foer)
Awesome.
20:39:
(Franklin Foer)
Well, as it happens, I have all these friends in the Capitol who I ran their campaigns.
20:46:
(Franklin Foer)
I know all the intimate details of their lives because I vetted them.
20:51:
(Franklin Foer)
They owe me.
20:51:
(Franklin Foer)
And so we can get you arms.
20:53:
(Franklin Foer)
No big deal.
20:54:
(Franklin Foer)
Now, I think it would be really helpful...
20:57:
(Franklin Foer)
to improve your image in Washington.
20:58:
(Franklin Foer)
I think that'll help.
21:00:
(Franklin Foer)
That'll help get you even to get you those tanks that you were looking for.
21:03:
(Franklin Foer)
And maybe even we can get you some foreign assistance so that you can build some clinics that you can name after yourself.
21:08:
(Franklin Foer)
And I think if I could get you an interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline, that would be really helpful.
21:14:
(Franklin Foer)
We can coach you for that.
21:15:
(Franklin Foer)
We can make sure that you get the best suits, that you get the best manicure.
21:20:
(Franklin Foer)
And then also, you know what I think would be really helpful to your reputation is if we had an election.
21:25:
(Franklin Foer)
We know, of course, you're going to win the election, but let's have an election.
21:30:
(Franklin Foer)
I think it'll look really good with the administration back here and on Capitol Hill.
21:35:
(Franklin Foer)
And you're going to win the election, we know.
21:37:
(Franklin Foer)
But it'll also be a chance to run some advertisements for you back at home to remind your people all the amazing things that you've done for them.
21:47:
(Matt Thompson)
You make a good case.
21:48:
(Franklin Foer)
10 million dollars, please.
21:52:
(Matt Thompson)
Wow.
21:52:
(Matt Thompson)
That's an impressive sales pitch.
21:54:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I come back to this same question, though.
21:56:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
This is going on not with countries that are natural allies of the United States.
21:59:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Some are allies of the United States.
22:00:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
There might be non-democratic allies, but they're allies.
22:03:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But some are just...
22:04:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
plain old bad countries why didn't the system and this is what I think of I think of Washington as having a compromised immune system where was the immune system that said to a Paul Manafort that's disgusting what are you doing you're operating on behalf of a foreign power George Washington himself said no foreign entanglements and look what you're doing you're entangling
22:24:
(Franklin Foer)
Well, there was the famous essay about dictatorships and double standards.
22:29:
(Franklin Foer)
We developed some of our own double standards, right?
22:32:
(Franklin Foer)
Gene Kirkpatrick.
22:42:
(Franklin Foer)
for the Reagan administration about dictatorships and double standards, that in fighting the Cold War, sometimes we had to embrace countries whose values didn't really resemble ours, but they were our friends in the Cold War, and winning the Cold War was the most important thing.
22:56:
(Franklin Foer)
And one of the gifts that Manafort had was that he understood the mind of the conservative movement.
23:02:
(Franklin Foer)
And so he could take somebody like the president for life of Podcastistan, who doesn't really care about the Cold War,
23:10:
(Franklin Foer)
Doesn't really care about capitalism.
23:12:
(Franklin Foer)
Doesn't really care about democracy.
23:13:
(Franklin Foer)
But Manafort knew how to dress you up in just the right sorts of ways where we could set up the right meetings with the people at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank.
23:26:
(Franklin Foer)
We could have you deliver a speech about the horrors of communism.
23:32:
(Franklin Foer)
And so in my image making on behalf of podcastistan, I could take you and make you look like the Thomas Jefferson of your country.
23:42:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Nice job.
23:44:
(Franklin Foer)
It seems like what you're saying – I mean part of your outrage about this is that it just seems alien in so many ways to how we kind of wish Washington worked.
23:53:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's just – it's one of the more ostentatious examples of –
23:57:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
people who've come to Washington, some of whom have come to do good, end up doing well, but end up doing well in ways that actually goes against the best interest of the United States.
24:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It is not in the interest of the United States to support certain kinds of dictators.
24:12:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And yet people who were – and Manafort –
24:14:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And obviously we can't – it's hard to think of him now as an esteemed figure.
24:18:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But he was a guy.
24:19:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
He was connected.
24:20:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
He was Mr.
24:20:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Inside.
24:21:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That was one of the attractions to the Trump campaign of Paul Manafort was that he was Mr.
24:26:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Inside.
24:26:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And it's just amazing to me that over time our immune system was – our moral immune system was compromised to the point where this kind of behavior would be seen as normal.
24:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's lying on behalf of dictators.
24:40:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Yeah.
24:40:
(Franklin Foer)
But just to step back, I mean, there is predicate there, which is that he was lying in some ways on behalf of corporations or that there was – in kind of a widespread sort of way, you had lobbying.
24:55:
(Franklin Foer)
Lying on the – the corporations allow those corporations to get into these countries and do all the – No, I'm just saying that there's – let's say there's an energy company that needs representation in Washington in order to combat some environmental policy.
25:09:
(Franklin Foer)
Right.
25:09:
(Franklin Foer)
They play hard.
25:09:
(Franklin Foer)
They subsidize.
25:10:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
No, I get it's a continuum.
25:12:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I'm just saying when you're dealing with an actual foreign power, it's another story.
25:15:
(Franklin Foer)
It should be a different thing.
25:16:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The fact that Donald Trump's campaign would hire a guy who's working on behalf of some very dubious Ukrainian politicians says enough.
25:24:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Yeah.
25:25:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Sometimes the scandal, sometimes the Russia scandal is the stuff that's right in front of your face the whole time.
25:30:
(Matt Thompson)
Totally.
25:30:
(Matt Thompson)
I asked you for a positive reference on Paul Manafort.
25:35:
(Matt Thompson)
But I'm curious, if I were to call up Oleg Deripaska and ask him for a reference on Paul Manafort, what would he tell me?
25:41:
(Franklin Foer)
So Oleg Deripaska is Russia's aluminum magnate.
25:46:
(Franklin Foer)
He obtained his fortune in the 1990s in the so-called aluminum wars, which were really
25:53:
(Franklin Foer)
the most bloody of the struggles to seize control of the newly privatized assets of the old Soviet state.
26:01:
(Franklin Foer)
And in that struggle, there's this long line of dead bodies, and Deripaska is the guy who triumphed.
26:09:
(Franklin Foer)
And so Manafort met Deripaska in the early 2000s, and Deripaska became a client of Manafort's.
26:17:
(Franklin Foer)
And Manafort would travel to Moscow, sit in Deripaska's office, and eventually Deripaska invested money with Paul Manafort, money that was meant to be invested in Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe as private equity.
26:33:
(Franklin Foer)
Mm-hmm.
26:34:
(Franklin Foer)
And for Deripaska, the money that he was investing with Manafort was actually relatively trivial because on the eve of the financial crash in 2008, Deripaska was worth $28 billion.
26:47:
(Franklin Foer)
So to invest $100 million with Manafort, say, would be nothing.
26:52:
(Franklin Foer)
But then the financial crash happens.
26:54:
(Franklin Foer)
Deripaska needs to get bailed out by Putin, which happens in this totally humiliating scene where Putin travels to Deripaska's factory and forces – gives him a loan, forces Deripaska to reopen his factories, which had been shuttered, makes him sign a paper promising to pay back the Russian state.
27:14:
(Franklin Foer)
And then after Deripaska signs a paper, Putin turns to him on TV and says, give me back my pen.
27:21:
(Franklin Foer)
Ouch.
27:22:
(Franklin Foer)
So he humiliates the guy.
27:23:
(Franklin Foer)
And so at this stage, Deripaska says, you know what?
27:26:
(Franklin Foer)
That money I invested with Paul Manafort might not have been worth anything to me before, but I need it now.
27:32:
(Franklin Foer)
And Deripaska is not the type of guy to overlook a debt.
27:35:
(Franklin Foer)
And so Manafort agrees to sell this one company that he invested in on behalf of Deripaska.
27:43:
(Franklin Foer)
And time passes.
27:45:
(Franklin Foer)
Manafort talks about struggling to sell the company.
27:47:
(Franklin Foer)
He promises Deripaska an audit.
27:50:
(Franklin Foer)
And then at some point, Manafort stops returning Deripaska's calls, stops responding to him.
27:58:
(Franklin Foer)
And this continues through the present.
28:01:
(Franklin Foer)
Only last month, Deripaska sued Manafort in New York asking for his money back.
28:08:
(Franklin Foer)
And at this stage, Deripaska believes that Manafort never really invested the money in the first place.
28:14:
(Franklin Foer)
Hmm.
28:14:
(Franklin Foer)
So Manafort, according to this Russian oligarch, was willing to steal $20 million from him, which is a pretty incredible thing.
28:23:
(Franklin Foer)
And then it has relevance to the Robert Mueller investigation because Manafort, as soon as he became part of the Trump campaign, turned to Deripaska and started to promise him access into the Trump campaign with the hopes, it seems like, of getting made, quote unquote, whole with Deripaska.
28:43:
(Franklin Foer)
Now, we don't know a lot about this, it should be said.
28:45:
(Franklin Foer)
We don't know if Deripaska ever responded to Manafort or if he even got the messages in the first place.
28:51:
(Franklin Foer)
But it does show you Manafort's frame of mind.
29:27:
(Matt Thompson)
I want us to talk about the Russia scandal specifically, and I want to get there through this quote from your story, Frank.
29:32:
(Matt Thompson)
Quote, conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C. corrupt all the idealists, naïfs and ingenues who settle there.
29:40:
(Matt Thompson)
But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards?
29:43:
(Matt Thompson)
What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp?
29:49:
(Matt Thompson)
That question is an interesting one given the insider-outsider dimensions of politics today.
29:55:
(Matt Thompson)
I think Washington, the Washington that you depict through the life of Paul Manafort and the career of Paul Manafort is one that I think in its most cartoonish versions, Americans –
30:06:
(Matt Thompson)
And I think what's surprising about your story is the inversion almost that, you know, this was a kind of sleepy, even the profession of Washington.
30:22:
(Matt Thompson)
Sorry, even the profession of lobbying was something somewhat sleepy before this guy came around and showed that.
30:27:
(Matt Thompson)
This town of fuddy-duddy dressing folks, how the Europeans dressed and what it looked like to really light the world on fire.
30:34:
(Matt Thompson)
Bring us to today.
30:36:
(Matt Thompson)
What is Paul Manafort's legacy and what might be his impact on the White House now?
30:42:
(Franklin Foer)
Well, so the legacy is the one that we've been describing, which is that in this narrative of corruption where you need somebody like Manafort who's brash, who just keeps pushing and testing the limits.
30:57:
(Franklin Foer)
And that's his contribution to American life is that he just knocked down limit after limit, making something that had been beyond the pale, normal and acceptable.
31:07:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah.
31:07:
(Franklin Foer)
And as we've said, we live in this world where if you were to go to Davos, the seat of global conventional wisdom, you have a lot of people running around that conference who 10 years ago would have been beyond the pale.
31:21:
(Franklin Foer)
They would have been gangsters.
31:22:
(Franklin Foer)
They would have been thieves.
31:23:
(Franklin Foer)
They would have been demons.
31:24:
(Franklin Foer)
But it takes people like Paul Manafort to render those people culturally acceptable.
31:32:
(Franklin Foer)
And that's what he did.
31:33:
(Matt Thompson)
Do you think the fact that Manafort has been indicted and that all of these details are spilling out into the public record, does that revert the norms perhaps back to –
31:44:
(Matt Thompson)
some sort of humanly recognizable decent mean.
31:48:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Good luck with that.
31:49:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah.
31:49:
(Franklin Foer)
I mean, so to say something for that thesis, there has been a rush to the foreign agent registration office where lobbyists who have been working in the shadows on behalf of clients suddenly see somebody getting punished for failing to disclose their work.
32:08:
(Franklin Foer)
And so it's had some almost immediate palpable impact in that sort of way.
32:13:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah.
32:13:
(Franklin Foer)
And you know what?
32:15:
(Franklin Foer)
For deterrence purposes, it does take having somebody like Paul Manafort being made an example of.
32:23:
(Franklin Foer)
And it's not just Paul Manafort.
32:24:
(Franklin Foer)
His tendrils expanded in different directions.
32:27:
(Franklin Foer)
He worked with Tony Podesta, who was the biggest lobbyist in Washington.
32:31:
(Franklin Foer)
And actually, Tony Podesta, because of this scandal and because of his work with Paul Manafort, has taken a big fall.
32:38:
(Franklin Foer)
So that's actually a big deal.
32:41:
(Franklin Foer)
You have heavy hitters
32:42:
(Franklin Foer)
who've been knocked down a peg.
32:44:
(Franklin Foer)
But does that change the culture of Washington?
32:47:
(Matt Thompson)
There's another aspect of this that's material to your story.
32:50:
(Matt Thompson)
You mentioned the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers as being these big exposures, these leaks that have made visible and public a lot of transactions that have previously been kept under the rug.
33:03:
(Matt Thompson)
Some of the details in your story derive from a leak of Paul Manafort's tax.
33:08:
(Matt Thompson)
And tell us a little bit about the process that you went through in figuring out responsible ways to fold that information into your story.
33:14:
(Franklin Foer)
Right.
33:14:
(Franklin Foer)
So there were millions of words of text messages that a Ukrainian hacktivist collective had purloined from Paul Manafort's daughter's cell phone.
33:28:
(Franklin Foer)
They expanded over years.
33:30:
(Franklin Foer)
And some of that information had been kind of cherry picked and prepackaged online.
33:36:
(Franklin Foer)
And there was primarily one quote where she was talking to her sister about their dad's fortunes, and she bemoaned the fact that they were essentially living off of blood money.
33:50:
(Franklin Foer)
It was a really, really compelling quote, a really stirring, bracing quote.
33:54:
(Franklin Foer)
And it appeared in The New York Times and Washington Post and all sorts of other media organizations.
34:00:
(Franklin Foer)
But people didn't really burrow much deeper than that into the rest of the text messages.
34:06:
(Franklin Foer)
And for my purposes, constructing a portrait of this guy, there were really compelling psychological reasons to look at those text messages.
34:16:
(Franklin Foer)
And it's a very, very intimate portrait of a family's life.
34:21:
(Franklin Foer)
And in a lot of ways, I struggled with using these messages because I don't want to live in a world where people's phones are hacked by political enemies and that information becomes weaponized.
34:34:
(Franklin Foer)
And so I tried to approach this information both as a journalist –
34:38:
(Franklin Foer)
where I was looking for information that served clear public purpose and that really helped prove a thesis and an argument that I thought was important and shed light on a guy who's at the center of the biggest scandal of our times.
34:57:
(Franklin Foer)
And also, I tried to approach that material in as a sensitive a way as possible because –
35:04:
(Franklin Foer)
These are human beings.
35:05:
(Franklin Foer)
And if there were instances where there was unnecessary scar tissue that would be left on people who are basically bystanders in the scandal, then I think we discussed that a lot here.
35:20:
(Franklin Foer)
And we tried to be as responsible as possible with that information.
35:26:
(Matt Thompson)
Do you all think that in the medium or long term, this moment that we're living in when information – it might be private conversations in one case.
35:35:
(Matt Thompson)
It might be offshore tax havens in another.
35:37:
(Matt Thompson)
This information can be suddenly put on the record and we're in a moment where things that had been previously easy to keep confidential are suddenly tumbling out into public view at a pretty dramatic clip.
35:54:
(Matt Thompson)
Who do you think will ultimately benefit most from that power?
35:58:
(Matt Thompson)
Is it the formerly powerless or is it the currently powerful?
36:02:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
No, it's just chaos.
36:04:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The truth is not going to win.
36:05:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I don't think the release of this kind of information, generally speaking, is going to lead to a
36:10:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
flourishing of accurate reporting and truth-telling um i worry about it i mean you know it's a complicated thing frank is talking about because as journalists pentagon papers on on up i mean before the pentagon papers as well if information finds its way into the public domain you use the information to tell the stories but um i uh i was just thinking about the term ukrainian hacktivist collective um
36:35:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
You want me to sign up?
36:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
As an intern.
36:39:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Maybe I'll get an internship.
36:41:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Work on their newsletter.
36:42:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The level of chaos that basically anarchists can create and more to the point, foreign governments with nefarious intentions can create has made me be a more circumspect emailer.
36:57:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's for sure.
36:59:
(Franklin Foer)
I see two competing considerations.
37:01:
(Franklin Foer)
So what we're talking about are secrets and the ways.
37:04:
(Franklin Foer)
And so sometimes closed doors, secrecy, these are covers for terrible behavior.
37:13:
(Franklin Foer)
And so the impulse to try to expose is important and powerful.
37:19:
(Franklin Foer)
It's a primary journalistic impulse.
37:23:
(Franklin Foer)
But on the other hand, I kind of don't want to live in a world where there are no secrets because part of secrecy is having the space to have conversations with yourself, conversations with intimates.
37:39:
(Franklin Foer)
And in that space is where we kick around ideas, where we vent.
37:46:
(Franklin Foer)
There are important intellectual and emotional reasons to have spaces that nobody can see.
37:52:
(Franklin Foer)
Because in that space, we're able to formulate our sense of self.
37:58:
(Franklin Foer)
And so I would hate for there to be a world where everything was transparent and
38:04:
(Matt Thompson)
I guess what we're – we've been cycling around and I think when the themes that your story does a really nice job of walking us along is this question of corruption.
38:15:
(Matt Thompson)
Where it festers and in that sweep of Paul Manafort's experience specifically from the 70s leading the young republicans to now, are we –
38:26:
(Matt Thompson)
In a moment when the circumstances that foster corruption are more potent and more common, we are now at a moment when an outsider has come to Washington promising to drain the swamp.
38:39:
(Matt Thompson)
Or are they now less effective?
38:42:
(Franklin Foer)
I mean, to me, Donald Trump represents in a way the culmination of our era, that here's this guy who's in some ways has built his business empire in ways that
38:56:
(Franklin Foer)
You could kind of broadly lump in with corruption, that he used political influence in order to profit.
39:03:
(Franklin Foer)
He believes in cronyism.
39:04:
(Franklin Foer)
And I do think that corruption now is kind of more rampant than it's ever been and that there's so much of respectable society now profits from corruption.
39:17:
(Franklin Foer)
That big law firms, big PR firms, big banks all have tremendous revenue streams that come from taking ill-gotten fortunes and helping make them –
39:32:
(Franklin Foer)
The whole idea of tax evasion, which is its own form of corruption, you know, every company has armies of accountants and lawyers that help them find ways to broker deals within these havens around the world where they kind of try to go beyond the reach of the American government to operate in this kind of parallel moral and ethical universe.
39:58:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It is funny just as a general commentary on the swamp.
40:01:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And this was true before the Trump era.
40:04:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's true in Obama, Bush before that.
40:06:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
We worry about – and we have laws against all kinds of petty corruptions.
40:10:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But in Washington, it is perfectly legal for a presidential administration to sell ambassadorships to the highest bidder.
40:16:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's a major crime.
40:18:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's not a minor crime.
40:19:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's a major – but it's just – I mean one of the great utilities of Frank's story is that it's –
40:26:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
A bracing explication of how bad it's all gotten without us knowing.
40:34:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I mean it's not true and everybody who works at The Atlantic knows that frogs don't actually let themselves get boiled slowly to death because Jim Fallows has been on a campaign to make us not use that.
40:43:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But if frogs did actually stay in the pot, we would be those.
40:47:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Something.
40:48:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Frogs.
40:48:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Frogs are actually talking about Washingtonians.
40:52:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
As look, you know, as people say, Washington politicians, often they just stay in the boiling pot.
40:57:
(Crosstalk)
Something makes me think that Thales is not smiling on this use of the metaphor.
41:01:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
No, as long as you acknowledge that the metaphor doesn't work, it's okay to use the metaphor.
41:04:
(Matt Thompson)
Frank, what went through your mind as the journalist who spent probably the most time with Paul Manafort's record and his words in many cases?
41:13:
(Franklin Foer)
PTSD.
41:14:
(Matt Thompson)
What went through your mind when Bob Mueller announced the indictment?
41:20:
(Franklin Foer)
To me, it was – Hurry up with the story.
41:22:
(Franklin Foer)
No, no, no, no.
41:24:
(Franklin Foer)
That's what went through your mind.
41:26:
(Franklin Foer)
I'm sorry.
41:26:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That was my mind.
41:28:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That was my mind.
41:29:
(Franklin Foer)
First of all, it was incredibly – I mean I found it to be gratifying because there was this record that I could see.
41:36:
(Franklin Foer)
And I think part of the problem with corruption sometimes is that it's sitting out there.
41:42:
(Franklin Foer)
Nobody seems to care about it.
41:44:
(Franklin Foer)
prosecutors aren't going after it.
41:46:
(Franklin Foer)
And so you start to kind of have to ask yourself, am I seeing something that doesn't exist?
41:51:
(Franklin Foer)
And so it's a form of vindication to have Robert Mueller spell it all out in technicolor detail.
41:58:
(Franklin Foer)
And in some ways, it was much worse than I expected when Mueller described all the accounts of
42:05:
(Franklin Foer)
in Cyprus and the Grenadines.
42:07:
(Franklin Foer)
I had an inkling about tens of millions, but I didn't know it was 75 million.
42:12:
(Franklin Foer)
And I didn't know how much he was spending on the suits.
42:14:
(Franklin Foer)
And I didn't know.
42:15:
(Franklin Foer)
And it was it was kind of it was a portrait of a portrait of this guy's Rube Goldberg esque financial contraption that he'd set up.
42:25:
(Franklin Foer)
And so I actually was enlightened by the Mueller indictment.
42:29:
(Franklin Foer)
Paul Manafort.
42:30:
(Franklin Foer)
Is there a soul in there?
42:32:
(Franklin Foer)
I was looking pretty hard for one.
42:35:
(Franklin Foer)
And I do think you get some glimpses of it.
42:38:
(Franklin Foer)
And it's one of the value of the text messages is that you could see that in some ways he's a loving father, a loving husband, a loving son.
42:49:
(Franklin Foer)
And so I could see the human being –
42:54:
(Franklin Foer)
I could see that he could be charming and that he's smart, that he reads books, that he enjoys the finer things in life.
43:06:
(Franklin Foer)
He's not Mephistopheles.
43:09:
(Franklin Foer)
He's still a flesh and blood human being.
43:14:
(Matt Thompson)
So listeners, if you want an uncomfortably detailed but scintillatingly written account of power and corruption and greed and wealth and DC and the world and how they've changed over the past several decades, make sure to check out Frank's March 2018 cover story, The Plot Against America.
43:34:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
On newsstands now-ish.
43:37:
(Matt Thompson)
With that, let us turn from corruption to the things that we want to keep.
43:43:
(Matt Thompson)
Keepers are closing segment in which I ask you, what are the things that you've heard, read, listened to, watched, experienced recently that you do not want to forget recently?
43:52:
(Matt Thompson)
So I'll go first this week.
43:54:
(Matt Thompson)
My Keeper this week is a two-part Keeper, possibly even three parts depending on how you count it.
43:59:
(Matt Thompson)
The first of those three parts is the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire.
44:03:
(Matt Thompson)
You may have encountered this show.
44:06:
(Matt Thompson)
Not many people seem to have done so.
44:08:
(Matt Thompson)
A lot of folks were turned off by the first season, understandably so.
44:12:
(Matt Thompson)
It almost transparently feels like AMC grasping at the greatness of Mad Men.
44:19:
(Matt Thompson)
They've got a kind of Don Draper-ish character that kind of animates the first season.
44:24:
(Matt Thompson)
But after that, there are hints of the show's greatness in that first season and then in the subsequent seasons, especially in season three and season four, it turns into an ensemble-led show with two women at its center.
44:39:
(Matt Thompson)
And their relationship and their collaboration, the company that they create and the journey that they go through –
44:45:
(Matt Thompson)
becomes such an amazing story of creativity, collaboration, leadership, management, innovation, what it means to innovate in an industry that is changing incredibly dramatically.
45:01:
(Matt Thompson)
The show takes place – it begins in the mid-'80s and takes place in the computer industry at the time.
45:09:
(Matt Thompson)
And goes through the mid-90s.
45:11:
(Matt Thompson)
And so you follow this band, this ensemble, as they leap from innovation to innovation, technology to technology, as hardware and software start to tumble onto each other, eventually becoming the internet.
45:27:
(Matt Thompson)
And they develop a string of companies as individuals, sometimes together.
45:32:
(Matt Thompson)
that show us something of what it's like to be in that churning maelstrom of invention at that moment.
45:40:
(Matt Thompson)
And finishing the show was wonderful.
45:44:
(Matt Thompson)
Mackenzie Davis, one of the two women who ultimately kind of takes the centerpiece of the show –
45:50:
(Matt Thompson)
gave this tremendous interview to E. Alex Jung at Vulture about some of the dimensions behind the scenes of the show, including being an actress who at first was paid less than her two male co-stars for her work, but went into the fourth season with AMC having equalized the pay between the women and the men who were leading the ensemble.
46:12:
(Matt Thompson)
The interview is revelatory.
46:14:
(Matt Thompson)
The show is revelatory.
46:16:
(Matt Thompson)
And as a companion, I might recommend the book.
46:20:
(Matt Thompson)
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning classic from the 70s.
46:28:
(Matt Thompson)
The two are wonderful compliments to each other, and I can't recommend both of them highly enough.
46:34:
(Matt Thompson)
Halt and Catch Fire, Mackenzie Davis interview with E. Alex Jung, and The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.
46:40:
(Matt Thompson)
Jeff, how about you go next?
46:42:
(Matt Thompson)
What is your keeper this week?
46:44:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's pretty simple compared to you.
46:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I saw Springsteen on Broadway.
46:48:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It was my 80th, approximately 80th time seeing him.
46:54:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's better.
46:55:
(Matt Thompson)
So you're like a middling Springsteen fan.
46:57:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's not middling.
46:58:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Come on.
46:59:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
That's pretty good.
47:02:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I saw his manager after John Landau after and –
47:05:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
He said at 100 – it's 100 is when he's impressed, but I'm impressed with myself.
47:11:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
But this is a fantastic show and it proves – it's the narrative, the book.
47:17:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Some of it is lifted right from the book, but it's beautifully done.
47:20:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And if you ever needed more proof that he is the child of James Brown and Bob Dylan, this show will be all the proof you need.
47:30:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And I don't want to have any arguments about the statement that I just made.
47:35:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Because that's not something that's open for discussion.
47:38:
(Franklin Foer)
No, no.
47:38:
(Franklin Foer)
Just to unpack it a little bit further.
47:40:
(Franklin Foer)
I mean, for you, if you were to identify Springsteen's greatness, especially to say somebody who's not in the cult of Springsteen, if you were trying to make a persuasive case to them, what would be the one paragraph case?
47:56:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
It's not even a paragraph.
47:58:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
He's the great interpreter of the American dream.
48:03:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
He himself recognizes that his music, much of his music falls in the space between American reality and American dream, but...
48:12:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
He's actually a huge idealist, and at this moment in American history, I think we need people like Bruce Springsteen more than ever.
48:19:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
And also, the music is really, really good.
48:23:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
He's a great poet, and he's a great performer.
48:25:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I actually think he has a great voice as well.
48:28:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I think he's the total package, and I've been going since high school, so I guess it's also partially nostalgic at this point.
48:37:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Right.
48:37:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Yeah.
48:38:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
No doubt.
48:40:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
You'll read my 90,000-word essay on Chris Springsteen, the man and the legend.
48:45:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The mythopoetics.
48:46:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
In the next nine issues of the Atlantic.
48:49:
(Matt Thompson)
Has anyone ever collected all of the – I mean the diehard Springsteen fans that follow him around the world.
48:53:
(Matt Thompson)
Has anyone ever collected like their Springsteen stories into some sort of a thing?
48:57:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
What a great idea for a podcast.
48:59:
(Crosstalk)
Just curious because I have several in my life.
49:04:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Yeah.
49:05:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I've done a little of that myself.
49:07:
(Matt Thompson)
Frank, what is your keeper?
49:09:
(Franklin Foer)
So this is this is a book that came out 10 years ago that I was sick last week.
49:15:
(Franklin Foer)
It was on my shelf and I read and really enjoyed, which is Shop Class as Soulcraft.
49:22:
(Franklin Foer)
Matthew Crawford, who is a philosopher who runs a motorcycle shop in Richmond.
49:30:
(Franklin Foer)
And the book is about kind of the almost existential moral.
49:38:
(Franklin Foer)
if I could even say it, ontological reasons why we should mess around with stuff, why we've become alienated from our hands, alienated from our machines.
49:51:
(Franklin Foer)
We have all these things in our lives.
49:54:
(Franklin Foer)
We have our phones.
49:54:
(Franklin Foer)
We have our computers.
49:56:
(Franklin Foer)
And if you look at your iPhone or your Mac, they're essentially sealed off.
50:00:
(Franklin Foer)
They're inaccessible to you.
50:02:
(Franklin Foer)
There's no way for you to understand even the inner workings of these things.
50:07:
(Franklin Foer)
And he makes this case about why we're better off kind of being people who understand our things, who use our hands.
50:19:
(Franklin Foer)
And there's a plea for kind of the cognitive powers of being, say, a plumber, which is something that people tend to look down on.
50:29:
(Franklin Foer)
And we tend to dismiss the trades and the crafts.
50:34:
(Franklin Foer)
What do you mean we?
50:35:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah.
50:36:
(Franklin Foer)
What do we mean we?
50:37:
(Franklin Foer)
Who's we?
50:39:
(Franklin Foer)
I'd say – One.
50:40:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
As a society – I'm messing with you.
50:44:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
I'm messing with you.
50:44:
(Franklin Foer)
No, no, but it's actually – so just to answer your question in an earnest sort of way.
50:48:
(Franklin Foer)
In terms of policy, say, there's this kind of assumption that we need to move people like that on to kind of places where they're office workers.
50:59:
(Franklin Foer)
Everybody should go to college.
51:00:
(Franklin Foer)
They should be skilled workers of some sort in a way in which skilled worker implies cognitively skilled.
51:06:
(Franklin Foer)
As opposed to skilled with your hands.
51:27:
(Franklin Foer)
Yeah.
51:28:
(Franklin Foer)
And I love that it's a pun on the George Will book, Statecraft is Soulcraft.
51:35:
(Matt Thompson)
Thank you very much for that.
51:36:
(Matt Thompson)
And with it, we have come to the end of another Radio Atlantic.
51:40:
(Matt Thompson)
Jeff, thanks as always.
51:42:
(Matt Thompson)
Thank you.
51:43:
(Matt Thompson)
Frank, first of many.
51:44:
(Franklin Foer)
You know, when I described this as an honor at the beginning, that was actually a faux Washington.
51:49:
(Franklin Foer)
It was actually a Washington statement, completely insincere, but it's been validated.
51:53:
(Franklin Foer)
And now I express it with great sincerity.
51:55:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Wait, your insincerity has been validated?
51:58:
(Franklin Foer)
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
51:59:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
The honor has been validated.
52:00:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Wait, sincerely validated insincerity.
52:03:
(Franklin Foer)
That's the most sincere form of insincere validation.
52:08:
(Jeffrey Goldberg)
Exactly.
52:08:
(Matt Thompson)
Thanks.
52:09:
(Matt Thompson)
Thanks.
52:13:
(Matt Thompson)
That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.
52:15:
(Matt Thompson)
This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau and Diana Douglas.
52:20:
(Matt Thompson)
Thanks, as always, to my co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, and thanks to our colleague, Franklin Ford, for joining us.
52:25:
(Matt Thompson)
Alex Wagner will be back with us again next week.
52:28:
(Matt Thompson)
Leave us a voicemail with your contact information and your thoughts on the episode at 202-266-7600.
52:35:
(Matt Thompson)
Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.
52:40:
(Matt Thompson)
Don't miss the show notes in the episode description.
52:42:
(Matt Thompson)
And if you like what you're hearing, please rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.
52:49:
(Matt Thompson)
Most importantly, thank you for listening.
52:52:
(Matt Thompson)
May all your secrets be sweet ones and may they be kept.
52:56:
(Matt Thompson)
We'll see you next week.