Time and Tides: Destroying and Building in Washington with "No One To Talk To”
Dear Friends,
Welcome to March’s Substack.
I hope you’ll enjoy this month’s blog Time and Tides: Destroying and Building in Washington with "No One To Talk To.” The audio version is available by clicking the link in the blog itself or clicking the link here for all podcasts. https://joanneleedomackerman.substack.com/podcast
Book News this month shares brief news and interviews, notice of the paperback of The Far Side of the Desert coming out in April.
The Writers at Risk section focuses on the cases of Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk, playwrights imprisoned in Russia.
The Books to Check Out section features Ken Roth’s new book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments and Peter Osnos’ LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail.
In the Scene section you’ll find photos along with text from The Far Side of the Desert.
With the release of my novel The Far Side of the Desert in paperback this spring I look forward to meeting new and old readers. If you’ve already read the book, I hope you’ll share the paperback with friends.Thank you to all who’ve come to bookstores, libraries, book clubs and online for both my latest novels Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert.
If you’re interested in having me speak at a venue or with a book club, you can click here. Thank you too for reading and sharing this free monthly Substack On the Yellow Brick Road. I look forward to staying in touch.
Time and Tides: Destroying and Building in Washington with "No One To Talk To”
The sun is rising but hiding. I know the sun is there by its effect, by light shining up on the clouds above, even though I can’t see the sun.
It is mid-January in Florida, and I’m sitting fully dressed in the sand by the ocean at high tide on a chilly day. The ocean rolls closer and closer to me on the wet sand. When should I move? I’m testing the tides. Can I hold my ground, or do I have the instinct & wisdom to know when to retreat to higher ground?
I went south for a few days in January just to remember warm weather and sun, only it was cold & rainy most of the week. But I was productive sitting in one place for hours writing on a new book—12,000 words in a week—words that need reshaping and editing but I also edited them each day.
Finally on my last day the sun appeared. The temperature rose a bit, and I could sit outside in the morning in a sweatshirt and not freeze as I watched the sun battle its way through the clouds, only the sun wasn’t doing the battle. It was there shining, always there. It was the clouds hanging over it I had to see through, look for the effect of the sun shining upward, lighting the patches of sky which the clouds weren’t covering, illumining the edges of the clouds themselves with a fringe of pink and golden light.
Oops...it’s time to get up as that last wave touched the top of my toes and the clouds settled in again over the face of the sun.
Back on the Eastern shore of Maryland, mid-February: I wake early along with the birds which share their song on the river. The stars are disappearing from view as the sky grows light and turns a pale grey. The river is as still as glass this morning. Land, water, wildlife appear to be waiting for the dawn and for spring. New birth, hope, promise are in the morning air in spite of fraught affairs on the ground.
Just 80 miles away in Washington, DC the world feels as if it’s fracturing. In the bitter cold and crackling atmosphere plants still lie dead in winter and appear unmoved by the possibility of spring. Here government buildings are losing their signage even before such acts are rendered legal. USAID which provides aid and services for hundreds of thousands abroad who are in need of food and shelter is being shuttered even before the closing down is sanctioned by courts or Congress. The magnificent US Institute of Peace which was created by an Act of Congress as a nonpartisan space with a mandate to provide tools and activities around the globe that lead to peace-building among combative factions in nations has been put on a list for closure, but it was Congress, not the executive, that sanctioned it. The post office itself which was created as an independent agency is reported soon to be shuttered in my own neighborhood and turned over to whom? The Kennedy Center, a hub of the arts—drama, opera, music—in Washington, again a nonpartisan space, not created for partisan players has been handed over to the administration, to a President who was not elected with a majority—just 49.9% of the vote. Unelected, unvetted individuals are attempting to shut down whole offices and letting go hundreds of thousands of workers without process or evaluations and reportedly assigning tasks (and contracts worth billions) to the one shutting them down, contracts never opened to bidding.
Over the last weeks, I have been on numerous calls with nongovernmental humanitarian organizations, human rights organizations, United Nation organization, all struggling to figure out what these shutdowns of funds and people will mean for their future.
“The call about the Stop-the-Work orders was cancelled because of the Stop-the-Work order,” one individual reported ruefully. “We called for clarification but there was no one there to talk to.” “There were no metrics, no standards or criteria offered about how decisions would be made on resuming funding or returning personnel,” several people reported.
I have spent my years in what I’ve considered a relatively nonpartisan space even though I live in Washington. Beginning my career as a journalist, I believed and continue to believe it is important to have individuals who are “fair brokers”—not beholden to any political party. I have rarely contributed to political parties or campaigns; I contribute to issues. I vote, but I don’t campaign for specific candidates or parties. I try to see value in each and to provide a bridge for ideas. I have a point of view, but my view and judgement are not beholden nor am I trying to drive it. I haven’t joined a party though I appreciate and respect those who do. There are issues I think/hope are beyond party—education and human rights to name two. For decades foreign policy has been a space where the two parties could at least agree on what was the national interest even if disagreeing on the path to get there. They agreed about the importance of protecting the US and other countries’ freedoms—freedom of expression and freedom to choose.
Soon we will welcome warmer weather, extended sunlight, and the daffodils of spring, but I am deeply worried about the body politic and the direction of my country in a way I haven’t been during my lifetime. For much of this period, America has been—if not always the beacon on the hill—at least a safe harbor, a place where those living without the rights of the individual protected and respected, could look to and be assured of moral support, assistance, and sometimes refuge.
I have warned others not to let fear drive the discourse or agenda these days lest we fulfill our own fears. As I end this blog, I warn myself the same. One by one we will need to find what we can do well and do it, whether it is writing, sharing ideas, donating to causes or helping a neighbor. One by one we will need to dissolve, or at least curb, fear by actions that embrace and care and continue believing and acting to advance a “shared world.”
On the calls and in the meetings with the nonprofits and UN agency, I’ve listened to individuals who are mobilizing to address this new world, to find ways to keep services alive. Few spend time remonstrating. Instead, they are addressing what can be done and looking for answers. Those individuals who are driven by retribution are looking backwards. Retribution is a misshaped tool that tries to punish the past and shape the future with a hammer rather than with a scalpel and imagination. An architect and builder can plan and build a future, but that is not what we are seeing at work. To paraphrase the wisdom of others: It takes little time to destroy but years and centuries to build.
The paperback of The Far Side of the Desert is released April 15 from Oceanview Publishing. I hope you’ll order, read and enjoy. If you’ve already read the novel, thank you! If you enjoyed, I hope you’ll buy the paperback and give it to friends!
I’ll be at the Annapolis Book Fair May 3 on a panel about international fiction. Details to follow.
”The Far Side of the Desert is that rare story – a literary work and a first-rate thriller. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, who has traveled the world advocating for human rights, is one of the few writers today who can construct a superb and complex international spy novel. The Far Side of the Desert is stellar. “
—Jennifer Clement, former President of PEN International and award-winning novelist of Prayers for the Stolen, Gun Love and The Promised Party
Burning Distance (Oceanview Publishing, 2023 and paperback in 2024) was honored by the 2024 American Book Fest International Book Awards as a Finalist in the Best Mystery/Suspense and Thriller/Adventure categories.
“Burning Distance” is a double helix of a book, carefully plotted and beautifully told. It’s a spy story interwoven with a love story, and the strands fit together in a way that moves the reader effortlessly from chapter to chapter. While fiction, its narrative of the CIA and the Middle East arms trade are very close to fact. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman observes the world of American spies and Arab fixers through the eyes of a young woman who keeps asking questions about her mysterious past until she gets all the revelatory answers. A subtle and satisfying novel.´
—David Ignatius, New York Times best-selling author, Washington Post columnist and novelist
I was pleased to be part of the Authors for LA Auction which raised funds for the Red Cross in support of writers and others in the Los Angeles fires. Funds are still needed and a list of where you can donated is at the end of the blog in my February substack.
Thank you to HastyBookList for featuring Burning Distance on their recommended list of books set in London.
Thank you to Book Notions for their recommendation of The Far Side of the Desert in their 2024 list of fiction.
And thank you to all who have come together and shared readings and conversations around my novels in 2024.
Below are some selected recordings of events and interviews:
“SNARKY, UNRELIABLE OR UNAPOLOGETIC: Developing a Unique Voice,” Thrillerfest, 2024
Book Launch for Akram Aylisli's People and Trees with Plamen Press
Why Baldwin Matters Series, The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center
Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in Asheville, NC
Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City with Salil Tripathi
Baum on Books on WSHU Public Radio
Interview with Anna Roins of Authorlink
Interview with Deborah Kalb
For more podcasts, videos and interviews, click here
Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk (Russia)
(Sources include PEN International, PEN America, The Guardian, Meduza, and BBC News)
Poet and playwright Zhenya Berkovich was arrested in May 2023 for her play Finist, the Brave Falcon, along with fellow playwright Svetlana Petriychuk.
The women were charged with “justifying terrorism,” in their play about women who were lured to marry jihadists on the internet, went to Syria, then returned to Russia and were imprisoned. Originally supported by the Russian Culture ministry, the play won two prestigious Russian Golden Mask Theater awards.
However, state witnesses insisted that the play contained “signs of radical feminist ideology” and romanticized terrorism. Berkovich countered, “I staged the play to prevent terrorism.”
After a trial behind closed doors, the court sentenced the playwright and theater director to six years in prison.
The arrest of Berkovich and Petriichuk is said to have “sent shock waves” through Russia’s artistic community which has faced increasing pressure since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
After the invasion in February 2022, it grew difficult and dangerous to express discontent about the war; facebook and other outlets were blocked. Zhenya held a piece of paper up on the street saying, “no war.” She was quickly detained for 11 days. Her poetry became popular. Her poem “Whether it was…”, voiced anxiety over the war and went viral. She became known as “the people’s poet.” Many consider this the real reason for her arrest. “It was the first time anyone in modern Russia had been jailed for poetry,” one writer observed.
Zhenya Berkovich received the Anna Politkovskaya Prize in 2023.
Take Action for Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk
Send Messages of Solidarity stating
• You are a fellow writer/journalist who has learned of their imprisonment;
• That you are sending a message of goodwill in the hope that your card finds them in good health/spirits;
• Give a return address should they be able to reply.
Address [Yevgenia Berkovich]
Беркович Евгения Борисовна 29.04.1985 г.р.
Адрес: 109383, г. Москва, ул. Шоссейная, д. 92, ФКУ СИЗО-6 УФСИН
России по г. Москве
All messages must be written in Russian. Please see sample message below:
Дорогая Евгения! Мы выражаем нашу солидарность с тобой, с твоей работой и твоим мужеством. Мы продолжаем выступать за твое освобождение.
Dear Yevgenia, we stand with you and celebrate your work and courage. We will keep advocating for your freedom.
Address [Svetlana Petriychuk]
Петрийчук Светлана Александровна 22.04.1980 г.р.
Адрес: 109383, г. Москва, ул. Шоссейная, д. 92, ФКУ СИЗО-6 УФСИН 13
России по г. Москве
All messages must be written in Russian. Please see sample message below:
Дорогая Светлана! Мы выражаем нашу солидарность с тобой, с твоей работой и твоим мужеством. Мы продолжаем выступать за твое освобождение.
Dear Svetlana, we stand with you and celebrate your work and courage. We will keep advocating for your freedom.
An attack on a writer, the shutting down of a publishing house, the torching of a newspaper reduce the space in the world where ideas can flow. Freedom of expression is vital to writers and to readers but is challenged daily around the world. Listed here are organizations whose work on human rights and in particular issues of freedom of expression I’ve been engaged with directly and indirectly over the years. Some of the organizations have broader agendas, but all have contributed to keeping space open for the individual voice.
PEN International (with its 147 centers in over 100 countries)
PEN American Center
English PEN
PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International
Amnesty International USA
International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX)
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Article 19
Index on Censorship
Poets and Writers
Authors Guild
International Center for Journalists
I’ve had the privilege of working with both Ken Roth and Peter Osnos for decades on the board of Human Rights Watch, and with Peter also on the board of the International Center for Journalists. Ken led Human Rights Watch for three decades. A dozen of those years I served on the HRW board and chaired the Asia Advisory Committee at Ken’s request right after 9/11 for eight years. I’ve continued to serve on several HRW Advisory Committees after I became an emeritus board member.
My longtime work in the field of human rights was deepened and honed around tables listening to Ken’s sharp legal mind and moral vision. Ken’s background as a lawyer allowed him to unpack often difficult questions and set out possible paths forward. Peter’s background as a journalist and editor led him to interviewing people, gathering information, making sense of it and finding a narrative that readers could understand. Both men are fierce in their intellect and ultimately compassionate in exacting and sometimes skeptical judgements.
I mention this caveat in presenting both of these books, noting my predilection to liking the books, then assuring that even had I never known the authors, I would highly recommend both Righting Wrongs and LBJ and McNamara.
The idea of human rights as a viable goal and principle to elevate the actions of governments is a relatively new concept developed in the latter part of the 20th century. One of the important organizations that has expanded this idea and operationalized its use is Human Rights Watch, founded in 1978. For thirty years Ken Roth was the President of Human Rights Watch and has been instrumental in the shaping of human rights doctrine used around the world.
His long-awaited book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments shows through stories and first-hand experiences how governments can be held to account by citizens and by independent organizations like HRW.
“There is nothing soft about human rights,” Ken Roth says. And nothing easy either.
Opening with the brutal attack on Idlib, Syria where the Syrians and Russians were bombing schools and hospitals to drive out the population, Ken takes the reader behind the scenes to witness how HRW’s strategy developed to put on pressure to stop the attacks. Concluding that Assad was beyond shaming, HRW decided to focus on Putin and lobby four countries whose opinion and goodwill he still cared about, including France and Germany. HRW also joined others to protest these attacks.
Ken expands on the reasoning behind HRW’s work and the development of strategies case by case. HRW partners with other organization and agencies as well to protect civilians when governments haven’t cared or were unable.
Ken has traveled the globe many times over to talk with heads of state and with victims of abuse on every continent, including in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Myanmar, in Eastern Europe, in Latin America. Righting Wrongs shows the development of his thinking and that of HRW about ways to effect change and shape policy for a more just world.
Not all missions have been a success, and mistakes have been made. The danger of a self-righteous outsider and voice from the West arriving and telling a country how to behave has been a challenge and is evident in many of these stories, yet the goal has been to halt torture and abuse, to hold governments to account and to raise the standard for a more humane and just world.
“Governments always have a reason to violate rights & we have to show why and how not to.”
“I am writing this book because I have found that when people understand the tactics we used to push back against abusive governments, they are encouraged to join the effort….Good ideas alone are rarely enough to overcome the comfort of inertia; generating pressure on a target is usually needed to tilt the balance in their favor. That requires understanding how to exert pressure and figuring out where it can be applied most effectively….
Demystifying this work—illustrating what we did to change government policy, not simply by standing for rights but by exerting pressure to uphold them—helps people to move from perfunctory support to active engagement.”
From Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments:
In countries with the rule of law, most people look to the courts to enforce human rights. But in many countries, judges have been corrupted, compromised, or killed, and are therefore unable to stop the government from violating rights.
Human Rights Watch, which I directed for three decades, figured out how to deploy the public’s sense of right and wrong to pressure the political branches of governments to respect rights. The process is not ideal—a strong, independent judiciary is often better—but it can be remarkably effective. This book pulls back the curtain to show the strategies that we used, both what worked and what did not.
People, of course, want human rights, at least for themselves, but governments that are intent on retaining power by suppressing political opposition often resist. The result is a struggle, one in which the never-ending duty of the human-rights movement—of people who care about rights—is to increase the price of oppression, to shift a government’s cost-benefit calculation so that abuse no longer seems as desirable. Much can be done, but the process is rarely linear.
“The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” yet there is no guarantee of respect for rights. Indeed, in a less remembered part of the same speech, Dr. King admitted as much: “[H]uman progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals.”
As I show, it is entirely possible for a relatively small group of people—Human Rights Watch and our allies—to succeed in curbing or mitigating abuse. But even when the pressure falls short, it is still often felt, helping to prevent further deterioration. Almost always, a price can be imposed for misconduct in order to discourage officials from behaving badly, though the route may not at first be obvious. My colleagues and I constantly had to analyze where our points of leverage might be. We found that the combination of creativity and perseverance regularly yielded productive paths to right the wrong.”
In LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail, Peter Osnos offers a behind-the-scenes look at a major period of American history as our involvement in the Vietnam War escalated even as the leaders conducting the war grew more and more skeptical that the South Vietnamese with the US could win the war. At its height America committed over half a million soldiers to Vietnam with high casualties.
A reporter and editor for The Washington Post, Peter had direct contact and knowledge of the war on the ground. As an editor at Random House for several of McNamara’s books, he had access to private journals and had multiple conversations with McNamara about the conduct of the war, his thinking as Secretary of Defense, and his partnership with President Lyndon Johnson.
The behind-the-scenes revelations of how foreign policy and the war were conducted play against the troubling times as protests filled the streets in the US. The book includes President John Kennedy’s engagement, his assassination and the speculation about what he would have done had he lived and won a second term. McNamara’s close relation to Jackie Kennedy who vehemently opposed the war, Bobby Kennedy’s dislike of Johnson, the politics and power that shrouded judgement—all are on display in this portrait of two men and their friendship and the ultimate tragedy they prosecuted in spite of knowing better.
From LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail:
As the United States approached the fiftieth anniversary of the withdrawal of the last American combat forces from Vietnam, I began to focus on what I have come to believe was a decisive factor in what was, ultimately, an American defeat: the relationship, personalities, and characters of the two men most closely identified with the misbegotten policies, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert Strange McNamara.
My work with McNamara, beginning in 1993 and culminating in the publication of In Retrospect in 1995, involved scores of conversations that enabled him to confront what went so badly wrong. The hundreds of pages of transcripts, I now realized, were more candid and therefore revealing than what McNamara would allow himself to say in the book.
The release of hundreds of hours of audio recordings from Johnson’s presidency, many dealing with Vietnam; the assessment of LBJ prior to the height of the Vietnam war in Robert Caro’s monumental biography; and a library of relevant books by others have provided me with the narrative to make the point that the Johnson-McNamara partnership, so crucial to the war, was from the outset destined to end in failure.
And based on their own words, the two men knew that they would certainly not prevail, almost from the moment they began working together on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
This book describes what happened in the years between 1963 and McNamara’s last day as secretary of defense in February 1968, only weeks before Johnson himself would announce that he would not run for reelection that fall. Johnson returned to Texas by any measure a broken man, and McNamara spent the rest of his life, privately and eventually publicly, coming to terms with the debacle.
This book is an account of how this happened and, to the extent possible, why.
Sharing here images and passage of text from The Far Side of the Desert:
Rising into the dark sky were the two Pillars of Hercules—the Rock of Gibraltar in Europe erupting from the sea like a giant’s thumb and the gentler Monte Hacho in Ceuta on the coast of Africa, one of the places Greeks and Romans thought the world ended, now a city in Spanish Morocco. The Romans believed Hercules created the Straits by pulling apart the land masses, using these two pillars, then he wrote on the rocks: "Non Plus Ultra”: There is nothing beyond. When Columbus “discovered” America, the Spanish Royal Coat of Arms had been amended to include, “Plus Ultra,” acknowledging something did exist beyond….
(Over the years I’ve accumulated a running list of words I haven’t known from two main sources: WordDaily and WordGenius)
Haptic
/ˈhaptik/
Part of speech: adjective
1. of or relating to the sense of touch
2. of or relating to tactile sensations and the sense of touch as a method of interacting with computers and electronic devices
Part of speech: noun
1. a vibration or other tactile sensation received from a computer or electronic device
Examples
"Haptic feedback devices create the illusion of substance and force within the virtual world."
“You can save power by adjusting the haptics and brightness of your phone.”
Lagniappe
/lanˈyap/
Part of speech: noun
Something given as a bonus or extra gift.
Examples
“My grandmother always slips a lagniappe, such as a chocolate or a postcard, into her guest’s napkins as a part of their table setting.”
“The café offers a shortbread cookie as a little lagniappe with each cup of coffee.”
“A glass of champagne is a nice lagniappe to receive at the salon, but it’s not the only reason I go to my hairdresser.”
I’ve spoken at bookstores, university classes, book luncheons and in-person and zoom book clubs and look forward to more ahead. I enjoy giving readings and addressing audiences in many venues and moderating discussions on a wide range of topics and most of all meeting readers.
Click here for a list of future and past public events.
Or fill out the speaking request form to schedule an event.
I like engaging with readers so if you are in a Reading Group or Book Club and read one of my books, I’m glad to be in touch by email, zoom, or when possible in person. I can also suggest discussion topics.
Fill out the reading group form here to schedule a meeting.
