racism

“Zero Fail” Tells Some Great Stories, But–

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Carol Leonnig has done a good job tracing the roots and the routes of the Secret Service in what’s unfortunately an overly long and very choppy book. 

On the plus side, it’s fascinating to learn that the Secret Service was formed in 1865 in the Treasury Department as a group fighting massive counterfeiting.  It’s also intriguing to see how different presidents and First Ladies over time have placed unique demands and restrictions on the agents protecting them–or treated them in special ways.  Who can forget Barbara Bush giving agents leftovers from White House events or LBJ speaking to his agents while he was on the toilet?  How many of us knew that the Secret Service was so tradition-bound and arrogant that it interfered with their mission to protect the president?

That being said, the book is slow, gossip-filled, and profoundly repetitious as the author explains terms and events way too many times, sometimes even repeating information a few pages apart or less.  The sloppiness is matched by the apparent political bias. Republican presidents (and their wives) seem to get more favorable reporting than the Democratic ones, especially when it comes to the Clintons.  Did Leonnig really need to devote 20+ pages to Monica Lewinsky?  And why is Betty Ford absent and Carter’s presidency barely covered?

Then there’s the way Leonnig shades certain events.  She notes, for example, that when Obama beat Romney he got “slightly more than 51% of the vote” without mentioning the impressive Electoral College vote of 332 to 206.  Or that Obama won 5,000,000 more votes than his opponent.

The drumbeat through this book is bureaucratic infighting, trouble, shocking surprises, scandal, and dramatic, overdue change. The Secret Service is time and time again forced to improve security around the president when there’s an assassination attempt or terror attack. It seems to have been oddly reactive, not very forward-thinking, and often inept in trying to get increased funding from Congress. 

Just as problematic, its leaders worked hard to keep outrageous sexual scandals and problems with racism and sexism under wraps, sometimes lying to Congress.  Chapters where Leonnig describes massive failures by the Security Service and seething intra-agency rivalries have plenty of power and read as if they’re material for a miniseries.

The author has won several Pulitzer Prizes for her reporting in the Washington Post, so perhaps her publisher didn’t think editing and copy editing really mattered: the assumption was that the book would sell no matter how badly it was produced.  That’s too bad, because this could have been a gripping narrative, but at almost 500 pages it feels ponderous and overstuffed. 

As it stands, Zero Fail is undercut by constant repetition, like noting who someone works for twice in two pages, and by annoying descriptions of people that don’t match up: one Secret Service director is six feet four and then six feet three a few pages on.  When an author is that careless about a minor detail, can you really trust her on major ones?

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, The Huffington Post and other publications and several public radio stations in Michigan.  He’s the author of 27 book in many genres, one of which has sold 300,000 copies, and has seen his work appear in fifteen languages.

Why Are People Surprised Cops Injured A Peaceful 75-Year-Old Protestor?

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The recent video of a Buffalo senior citizen being shoved to the ground by cops went viral and was one more example of the ways in which police departments around the country have turned into small armies. 

Back in the Obama administration, official Washington was having second thoughts about the giant giveaway of military grade equipment to local police forces. But it was already too late to reverse a decade of bad policy and bad thinking because too many American cops were thinking of citizens as “The Enemy.”

And it wasn’t just Black citizens–though they’ve been assaulted and killed in disproportionately high numbers. It was and is all citizens.

A sea change was taking place that was invisible to most Americans. Across the country, in big cities and small towns, police forces gradually turned into armies. It took the events in Ferguson to blow things wide open. Senators like Claire McKaskill started to speak out, too late, about the results of a misguided policy: “The whole country and every representative and senator have seen the visuals, and at some level, it made all of us uncomfortable.” Note her shocking understatement and the typical D.C. focus on “optics.”

Those optics have only gotten more horrifying.

The technical term for the change  is “militarization.” Well before 9/11, the Pentagon was lavishing cops in every state with military equipment, but that’s escalated since 2006 as the Pentagon has unloaded surplus assault rifles; armored vehicles; planes and helicopters. The total dollar amount has now reached into the billions since that terror attack has made everyone think they’re the next target, no matter how improbable it might seem.

Even tiny towns want armored personnel carriers. And they use them. For things like serving warrants and drug raids. That’s right. For ordinary police work that used to done without military hardware.

Assault with a Deadly Lie: A Nick Hoffman Novel of Suspense (Nick Hoffman Mysteries Book 8) by [Lev Raphael]
50,000 SWAT team raids take place in this country every year. The U.S. is now a war zone and our police have morphed into soldiers. They raid at night for maximum shock and awe, break down doors, use flash bang grenades, shoot people’s dogs, wreck homes, and commit violence on innocent citizens. They often raid the wrong house because their information is out of date. Sometimes they even kill unarmed citizens. And they haven’t really been accountable to anyone, despite the string of news stories that have been appearing on local TV stations and in local and national newspapers for years.

I started reading about these epidemic SWAT raids a decade ago and was shocked to learn that police forces were recruiting ex-military and radically shifting their consciousness and their perceived mission. Forget serving the public. The public is the enemy, at least potentially, and the enemy has to be crushed. As more ex-soldiers have entered the police force and more cops have been trained by the military, the danger has increased to the general public everywhere.  

And you know this is a searing problem when organizations as different as the ACLU and The Heritage Foundation agree that America’s police are out of control.

That’s one reason I wrote Assault With a Deadly Lie, a novel of suspense that explores the crushing effects of police brutality on innocent people. Because nowadays, none of us are really innocent when cops are on the scene. We’re all criminals, no matter who we are or where we live. As the defense lawyer in my book says, after 9/11, “You think you have rights and freedoms, but everything is contingent now.”

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-six books in a dozen different genres, from memoir to mystery.

Reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” As an Adult

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When the first Hobbit movie was coming out, I re-read the novel I loved as a kid to reacquaint myself with the story and was more enthralled than I expected to be.

The wry voice was something I missed as a twelve-year-old in love with the adventure and fantasy, and I reconnected immediately with what moved me most the first time: the ways Bilbo’s fooled Gollum and the dragon. In each case, the small, clever Hobbit outwits a fierce enemy.  That was a real treat for me as a bookish, picked-on kid with a tough older brother.


Harper Lee’s Scout also defeated monsters when she helped defuse the mob in front of the jail. It’s one of the best scenes in To Kill A Mockingbird–if not entirely believable.  But Scout herself doesn’t hold up for me today because I just don’t believe her voice. She often sounds too mature for an eight-year-old, like when she thought near the end of the book (according to her adult self) “there wasn’t much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.”

190px-MockingbirdfirstAnd I’m mixed about the book itself: it feels like an uneven blend of southern novel of manners with the “race novel” Lee originally intended, folded into a  courtroom drama which seems clichéd–through no fault of hers. We’ve all read so much John Grisham and Scott Turow, or maybe I have as a long-time crime fiction reviewer.  The story of the rape accusation takes way too long to get going.  And in terms of suspense, the final appearance of Boo Radley is a letdown after all the mystery and tension.  He’s just not that interesting.

Some of Atticus’s sentiments also grated on my nerves, like his belief that “a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human.” That feels hopelessly naive and sentimental–especially when you consider that Lee wrote the book after The Holocaust.  But closer to home, there was the brutality she saw in the south directed at Civil Rights protestors.

Flannery O’Connor damned the novel with pretty faint praise when it came out: “I think for a child’s book it does all right.” That seems unduly harsh (and unfair to YA literature). What works best for me as an adult reader is the local color, the barbed social comedy, and the graceful prose.

Of course the book’s dramatic core couldn’t be timelier: today’s America is still grappling with racial injustice just as Harper Lee’s fictional town was in Depression-era Alabama.  That’s sadly a story which seems to make the news every week–if not more often.

Lev Raphael’s 25 book Assault With a Deadly Lie is a suspense novel about militarized police.  It was a finalist for a Midwest Book Award.