Suskind, Ron 1959–

(Ronald Steven Suskind)

PERSONAL:

Born November 20, 1959, in Kingston, NY; son of Walter Burton and Shirley Lila Suskind; married Cornelia Kennedy, May 4, 1986; children: Walter Kennedy, Harold Owen. Education: University of Virginia, B.A., 1981; Columbia University, M.S., 1983.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Harry Walker Agency, Inc., 355 Lexington Ave., 21st Fl., New York, NY 10017. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Charles Robb for Governor campaign, Alexandria, VA, field coordinator, 1981; John Downey for U.S. Senate campaign, New Haven, CT, campaign manager, 1982; New York Times, New York, NY, news assistant and interim reporter, 1983-85; St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, FL, reporter, 1985-86; Boston Business Magazine, Boston, MA, senior editor, 1987-88, editor, 1988-90; Wall Street Journal, Boston, staff reporter, 1990-93, Washington, DC, senior national affairs writer, 1993-2000. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, instructor in advanced journalism, 1987-93; Big Ideas, Boston, MA, consultant, 1988-90; WBUR, Boston, MA, radio commentator, 1989-93; Dartmouth College, distinguished visiting scholar. Guest on television programs, including Frontline, Real Time with Bill Maher, Situation Room, and Colbert Report.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, 1995; Benjamin Fine Award, National Association of Secondary School Principals, 1995; National Writing Award, Ball State University, 1995.

WRITINGS:

A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, Broadway Books (New York, NY), 1998.

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2004.

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies since 9/11, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2006, with a new afterword, 2007.

Contributor to books by others, including Profiles in Courage for Our Times, Hyperion, 2002, and The Best American Political Writing 2003. Contributor to periodicals, including Esquire and the New York Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist Ron Suskind won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for two articles in the Wall Street Journal about Cedric Jennings, a black student from a poor school district near Washington, DC, who went on to attend Brown University. Suskind later expanded those writings into a book, A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. Suskind met Cedric in 1994 when he visited Frank W. Ballou Senior High School while looking for a story about how kids learn in "war-zone" schools in urban areas. While Suskind was in the office of Ballou's principal, Cedric came in to complain about a computer science grade, an A-, which Cedric argued should have been an A+. After Cedric left the office, Suskind asked the principal about Cedric and was told that Cedric's pride made him a target. Suskind found that most of the high-scoring students in these schools kept low profiles, but this was not the case with Cedric. In spite of being called a "geek" and "whitey" and being threatened and abused by black classmates who wanted to pull him down, Cedric continued to excel, and never faltered, even when he was threatened with death by classmates with weapons.

Suskind stayed in touch with Cedric during his final two years of high school and lived at Brown during Cedric's first year there. Although Cedric maintained a better-than-perfect 4.17 grade point average, his S.A.T. score was only 960. In schools like Ballou, the achievements of top students equate to those of average students in wealthier suburban schools. Cedric found few inner-city students in a summer program for minority students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or at Brown. Most of the other black students were from suburban schools, and Cedric had little in common with them. He did not smoke or drink and was faithful to the religious beliefs instilled in him by his single mother. Sara Mosle wrote in the New York Times Book Review that after reading the book, one cannot help but conclude that "we are no longer one country divided between black and white, but two nations even among blacks: the first increasingly middle-class and suburban, the second poor and disastrously isolated in our ghettos."

Mosle said Cedric's "monumental efforts put to shame arguments against affirmative action. But one begins to fear that his ostensibly inspirational story may be more depressing than we know…. It may be that the most crucial factor in his eventual success was dumb luck: that in 1994, a reporter named Ron Suskind took an interest in his story." A Publishers Weekly reviewer said "Suskind's reporting has produced interior monologue … making for a remarkably intimate, sometimes wrenching narrative." A reviewer wrote in Kirkus Reviews that "left hanging is the question of the ultimate success of Cedric's quest, which he is still only beginning. One senses the existence of conflicts unresolved and questions unanswered." "As readers celebrate one young man's singular persistence, they'll wonder how we can help more inner-city kids share Cedric's lifeline of hope," wrote Mary Carroll in Booklist.

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill is Suskind's account of the service of the first Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush. O'Neill agreed to the appointment, even though he, as well as his friend and then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, disagreed with Bush-Cheney economic policy, instead favoring fiscal restraint. In the fall of 2002, when the second Bush tax cut was being planned, O'Neill opposed it, citing the need for domestic reforms and the growing cost of the war in Afghanistan and what would soon be the war in Iraq. Because of the vast differences between the positions of O'Neill and the White House, O'Neill was fired in December of the same year.

Suskind told an Esquire interviewer that when it was reported in the Washington Post that O'Neill and Suskind were collaborating, O'Neill was contacted by Donald Rumsfeld, who told him it was a bad idea. O'Neill was later offered a job rebuilding Iraq's financial institutions but declined in favor of working with Suskind on The Price of Loyalty.

In The One Percent Doctrine: Deep inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies since 9/11, Suskind reports on the years from 2001 to 2004, during which period the George W. Bush White House emphasized the need for preemptive action in protecting the United States from terrorism and made the decision to go to war in Iraq. Suskind was able to mine the opinions of former Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) director George Tenet, as well as others in the C.I.A., F.B.I., and Defense, State, and Treasury Departments in revealing seldom-mentioned details, including the way in which the F.B.I. was provided with financial information by First Data Corporation, a subsidiary of Western Union, and how the federal government monitored telephone conversations and searched the Internet for suspicious patterns.

Suskind writes that sources who attended National Security Council briefings in 2002 told him that the war against Iraq was being carried out "to make an example of Saddam Hussein" and to "create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States." The title refers to remarks made by Vice President Richard Cheney after 9/11, which Suskind said meant that "if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction—and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time—the United States must now act as if it were a certainty."

Michiko Kakutani wrote in a New York Times review that Suskind portrays Tenet "as frequently being made by the White House ‘to take the fall’ for his superiors, on matters including the administration's handling of prewar intelligence to the 16 disputed words in the president's State of the Union address, regarding Iraq's supposed efforts to obtain uranium from Africa. Because it was Mr. Tenet ‘who brought analysis up the chain from the C.I.A.,’ Mr. Suskind writes, he ‘was best positioned to assume blame. And Rice was adept at laying it on Tenet.’" Kakutani noted that Suskind feels that Tenet became a "White House enabler: he writes that in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Tenet felt a ‘mix of insecurity and gratitude’ vis-à-vis George W. Bush, and that eager to please his boss, he repeatedly pushed C.I.A. staff members to come up with evidence that might support the president's public statements…. Mr. Suskind writes: ‘George Tenet would do anything his President asked. Anything. And George W. Bush knew it.’" Washington Post reviewer Barton Gellman wrote: "This is an important book, filled with the surest sign of great reporting: the unexpected. It enriches our understanding of even familiar episodes from the Bush administration's war on terror and tells some jaw-dropping stories we haven't heard before."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1998, Mary Carroll, review of A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, p. 1043.

Business Traveller Asia Pacific, May, 2004, Tom Otley, review of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, p. 10.

Commonweal, September 8, 2006, Nick Baumann, review of The One Percent Doctrine: Deep inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies since 9/11, p. 25.

Esquire, February, 2004, "The Most Explosive Book of the Year: Ron Suskind: The Price of Loyalty," interview, p. 102.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1998, review of A Hope in the Unseen, p. 392.

Library Journal, April 15, 1998, Francine Fialkoff, review of A Hope in the Unseen, p. 102.

Military Review, May-June, 2007, Jim Varner, review of The One Percent Doctrine, p. 117.

New Statesman, July 24, 2006, Brendan O'Neill, review of The One Percent Doctrine, p. 56.

New York Times, June 20, 2006, Michiko Kakutani, review of The One Percent Doctrine; July 21, 2006, Bryan Burrough, review of The One Percent Doctrine.

New York Times Book Review, August 2, 1998, Sara Mosle, review of A Hope in the Unseen, p. 6.

Orlando Sentinel, January 12, 2004, Nancy Pate, review of The Price of Loyalty.

Publishers Weekly, March 16, 1998, review of A Hope in the Unseen, p. 41; June 19, 2006, review of The One Percent Doctrine, p. 57.

Washington Monthly, April, 1998, review of A Hope in the Unseen, p. 40.

Washington Post, June 20, 2006, Barton Gellman, review of The One Percent Doctrine, p. C1.

White House Studies, fall, 2006, Jack Lechelt, review of The One Percent Doctrine, p. 429.

ONLINE

Consortium News,http://www.consortiumnews.com/ (July 27, 2006), Peter Dale Scott, review of The One Percent Doctrine.

Democracy Now Web site,http://www.democracynow.org/ (July 14, 2006), Amy Goodman, "The One Percent Doctrine: Journalist Ron Suskind on the Deliberate U.S. Bombing of Al Jazeera, Losing Bin Laden and More," interview.

PopMatters,http://www.popmatters.com/ (January 19, 2008), Chris Barsanti, review of The One Percent Doctrine.

Public Broadcasting Services Web site,http://www.pbs.org/ (January 19, 2008), interview.

Random House Web site,http://www.randomhouse.com/ (January 19, 2008), interview with Suskind and Cedric Jennings.

Ron Suskind Home Page,http://www.ronsuskind.com (February 19, 2008).

Spiegel Online,http://www.spiegel.de/ (October 27, 2006), Matthias Gebauer and Georg Mascolo, "Interview with Terror Expert Ron Suskind."