If you’d told me five years ago that I’d be not only reading, but enjoying, a book by a staunch conservative politician from Wyoming, I’d have advised laying down whatever pipe you’d been smoking. Fiction is my literary main squeeze (and I don’t mean the type of fiction spread by many Republicans after Trump’s election loss). Yet here I am, recommending it to you. Crazy times call for desperate measures and make strange bedfellows, as the pipe-smoker says.
Liz Cheney is many things, but she’s no fan of Donald Trump, and she cannot abide lies. So we started off on solid common ground. Like millions of us, I’d watched the January 6th hearings on TV, and I knew Cheney ultimately lost her job over her refusal to back down from the truth. I wondered what else she might have to say.
Cheney’s book covers the two-year period that includes the 2020 election, the events of January 6, the January 6th Select Committee’s work, and her primary loss to an election denier.
Most of this book reads like a taut courtroom drama, fittingly, since a lawyer wrote it. Part of it—her firsthand account of January 6, 2021—reads like a tense political thriller (which becomes even more tense when you remember that it really happened, and only some of the perpetrators are behind bars).
It’s a tad jargony, Cheney being a self-described nerd about legal topics. It’s sometimes preachy, though not in a bad way—Cheney’s dogma is “country over party” and “fealty to the Constitution over individual leaders.” But it’s smartly written, it’s well paced, and it’s never boring.
A reviewer for the L.A. Times said this book “oozes contempt” for Cheney’s former colleagues and “rarely veers beyond strident anger.” I wonder if we read the same book, as I perceived neither contempt nor anger. Quite the opposite: Cheney lays out the facts with a prosecutor’s meticulous detail. The book’s tone is cool and measured, never zealous or shrill. She includes plenty of juicy quotes from Republicans (Kevin McCarthy comes out looking particularly bad), but with little editorializing. Rather than whip them, she lets them hang themselves with their own rope. A case in point:
Cheney’s description of collaborating with her political opponent, Nancy Pelosi, was not in the least combative, but respectful: “She did not try to micromanage the work of the January 6th Committee, but she was there whenever we needed her. And over the next 18 months, every time I went to her with a concern, a proposed approach, or a request that she intervene with Democrats to help guide things in the right direction, she backed me up. Every time. A relationship that had been unimaginable just a few months earlier would now become indispensable.”
Reading this book reinforced what I already felt, deep down. We have more in common than not, even when we disagree politically. When we set our differences aside to work together on the things that really matter, we are at our best. The flip side of that is that when we hyper-focus on what divides us, we are at our worst. Anyone living in America since 2016 has witnessed that.
Speaking of what brings us together, I keep going back to this picture from the book’s photo insert. Every mom knows what’s going on here. The toddler has been made to miss nap time and wear uncomfortable shoes. All she knows is that it’s a special day for Mom. But Mom isn’t holding her; Mom is posing for photos near some pretty water. The toddler makes her way over—if Mom won’t pick her up, maybe she can go for a swim. Mom says “I don’t think so, missy!” but she smiles, because how could you not:
In summary: I recommend this book to every American. Its message is important, its points are unassailable, and its story is both personal and one that belongs to all of us.
Writing by Jen Mierisch 