No Confidence

John B. Judis
October 13, 2011 | 12:00 am

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

by Ron Suskind

JOHN B. JUDIS on RON SUSKIND'S WHITE HOUSE PORTRAIT 

 

RON SUSKIND’S NEW book has already aroused intense controversy. The former investment banker Steven Rattner, who advised the Obama administration on the auto bailout, described Confidence Men as “a drive-by shooting of a president and his key economic advisers who deserve encomiums, not unfounded second guessing and inaccurate revisionist history.” Jacob Weisberg, the chairman of Slate and Robert Rubin’s co-autobiographer, in a scathing review entitled “Don’t Believe Ron Suskind,” accused the author of being a disreputable journalist that readers should no longer trust.

Before turning to the substance of Confidence Men, I want to comment on these charges against this author. I think the book is filled with minor errors–the former Citicorp CEO was Walter Wriston, not Walter Wristen–and the initial third of the book rehashes material that readers could find in earlier books about the Obama campaign and the financial crisis. But I would argue that the errors and the inflated narrative reflect the current practices of some large American publishers, who spend little time or money on copy-editing or fact-checking and rush books out without much editorial pressure. As far as I can tell, Suskind’s errors are not discrediting—no more than was Weisberg’s and Slate’s error in publishing, along with Weisberg’s review, a photograph of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill labeled as Suskind.