George Packer - The unwinding: an inner history of the new America

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2013 by George Packer

All rights reserved

First edition, 2013

Portions of this work originally appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Packer, George, 1960

The unwinding: an inner history of the new America / George Packer. First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-374-10241-8 (hardcover)

1. United StatesHistory1969 2. United StatesSocial conditions1980 3. United StatesBiography. 4. Social problemsUnited States. 5. CrisesUnited States. 6. United StatesPolitics and government1989 7. PoliticiansUnited StatesBiography. 8. CelebritiesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

E839 .P28 2013

973.924dc23

2013004431

www.fsgbooks.com

www.twitter.com/fsgbooks www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

eISBN 9781466836952

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq , which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review . He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square , and two other works of nonfiction, Blood of the Liberals , which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and The Village of Waiting . His play, Betrayed , ran off-Broadway for five months in 2008 and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. His most recent book is Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade . He lives in Brooklyn.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the people whose lives compose the heart of this book.

For assistance on the road, I thank George and Page Gilliam of Charlottesville; Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo of Youngstown; Barbara Price of Stokesdale, North Carolina; the reporters and editors of the Tampa Bay Times ; and especially Pancho Sanchez of Tampa and his family. Thanks also to Gary Smith and the American Academy in Berlin for a 2009 Holtzbrinck Fellowship, and to Jean Strouse and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library for their invitation to give the 2011 Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures in American Civilization and Government.

For expert help of different kinds, I thank Nancy Aaron, Kathleen Anderson, Neil Belton, Julia Botero, Lila Byock, Peter Canby, Ray Chipault, Rodrigo Corral, Tom Ehrlich, Jiayang Fan, Tim Farrell, Amy Hanauer, Stephen Heintz, Henry Kaufman, Alissa Levin, Jonathan Lippincott, Rebecca Mead, Ellie Perkins, Chris Peterson, Chris Richards, Nandi Rodrigo, Ridge Schuyler, Jeff Seroy, Michael Spies, Scott Staton, Julie Tate, Matthew Taylor, Sarita Varma, Jacob Weisberg, Dorothy Wickenden, Laura Young, and Avi Zenilman. I am especially grateful to Sarah Chalfant, Jonathan Galassi, David Remnick, Alex Star, and Daniel Zalewskithere are none better.

I can never repay my debt to those friends and family members whose insight and enthusiasm sustained me through the years of workDaniel Bergner, Tom Casciato, Bill Finnegan, Kathy Hughes, Carol Jack, Michael Janeway, Ann Packer, Nancy Packer, Eyal Press, Becky Saletan, Bob Secor, Marie Secor, and especially Dexter Filkins; and most of all to Laura Secor, who makes everything possible.

ALSO BY GEORGE PACKER

NONFICTION

The Village of Waiting

Blood of the Liberals

The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq

Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade

FICTION

The Half Man

Central Square

PLAYS

Betrayed

AS EDITOR

The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World

Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays by George Orwell

All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell

A NOTE ON SOURCES

This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the people whose stories it tells, and with others who shared information and insight, supplemented by written sources, the most significant of which are listed below. The biographical sketches of famous people are drawn entirely from secondary sources, most usefully those listed below; the sketches sometimes paraphrase or quote the subjects own words as found in books, articles, and songs. The collages of individual years draw on a variety of sourcesnewspapers, magazines, books, speeches, songs, advertisements, poems, movies, television programsall of which were written, published, recorded, or shown in the given year. (A list can be found at www.fsgbooks.com/theunwinding.) Though this book is a work of nonfiction throughout, it owes a literary debt to the novels of John Dos Passoss great U.S.A. trilogy, published in the 1930s and overdue for a revival.

NARRATIVES

DEAN PRICE AND THE PIEDMONT

Allen Tullos, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

JEFF CONNAUGHTON AND WASHINGTON, D.C.

Joe Biden, Promises to Keep (New York: Random House, 2008).

Jeff Connaughton, The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins (Prospecta Press, 2012). The author generously shared an early draft.

Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

TAMMY THOMAS AND YOUNGSTOWN

Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

Terry F. Buss and F. Stevens Redburn, Shutdown at Youngstown: Public Policy for Mass Unemployment (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983).

Stephen F. Diamond, The Delphi Bankruptcy: The Continuation of Class War by Other Means, Dissent (Spring 2006).

David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 19291945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo, Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

John Russo, Integrated Production or Systematic Disinvestment: The Restructuring of Packard Electric (unpublished paper, 1994).

Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldnt Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

PETER THIEL AND SILICON VALLEY

Sonia Arrison, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith , with a foreword by Peter Thiel (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia and the Rest of Planet Earth (Los Angeles: World Ahead Publishing, 2010).

David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Jessica Livingston, Max Levchin, in Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days (New York: Apress, 2008).

Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook (New York: Anchor, 2010).

David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1998).

TAMPA

Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

Alyssa Katz, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).

Robert J. Kerstein, Politics and Growth in Twentieth-Century Tampa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

Paul Reyes, Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Floridas Great Recession (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

NEWT GINGRICH

Adam Clymer, The Teacher of the Rules of Civilization Gets a Scolding, New York Times (January 26, 1997).

Steven M. Gillon, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).