What Obama Should Read
Twenty-five books the new president should have by his bedside.
Barack Obama, it is safe to say, likes books more than his predecessor did. We know that much because he has written a couple of good ones—most notably, the well-received memoir Dreams From My Father, which launched him into the public sphere as a writer before his political career began—and because it is not a news event when he reads one, as it was when George W. Bush announced that he intended to thumb through Camus’s The Stranger on his summer vacation two years ago.
A president who is a serious reader is of course likely to be shaped by what he reads, and we know a bit about what has been on Obama’s list so far. From interviews, we know that Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls made an impression on him as a young man. His campaign reading list—or at least the books he chose to be seen with on the trail—included Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment, Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy, Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. And we know that, at least in the case of the latter book, Obama’s choice of reading has already had some impact on his governing choices (or at least on how pundits frame them on the Sunday-morning talk shows).
So in the hope that he’s willing to take a few more reading assignments, we asked a few of our favorite writers and thinkers to offer their suggestions on what the new president should have by his bedside. —Eds.
REZA ASLAN
Mr. President, if you are serious about negotiating with Iran, you need a guidebook on Iranian culture so that you can tell when "yes" means "no," when "no" means "maybe," and when "Death to America!" means "Please, let’s talk." May I suggest The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, by Hooman Majd? An Iranian American who lives in the States and has advised and translated for both current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former President Muhammad Khatami, Majd has written perhaps the best book on contemporary Iranian culture and all of its complexities and contradictions. Don’t go to Tehran without it.
Reza Aslan is the author of No God but God and the forthcoming How to Win a Cosmic War.
ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Barack Obama has identified Reinhold Niebuhr as "one of my favorite philosophers" and is familiar with the great Protestant theologian’s various writings. Yet as Obama assumes the mantle of Most Powerful Man in the World, Niebuhr’s Irony of American History is one volume that deserves a careful second reading.
Published in 1952, when the Cold War was at its frostiest and Americans were still coming to terms with what it meant to exercise global leadership, Irony called attention to a series of illusions to which Niebuhr believed his countrymen and their political leaders were peculiarly susceptible. To persist in those illusions, he warned, was to court political and moral catastrophe. History, he wrote, "is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management." To imagine that history can be coerced toward some predetermined destination represents the height of folly.
With the end of the Cold War in 1989, those very same illusions—now expressed through self-congratulatory claims that the end of history had elevated the United States to the status of indispensable nation called upon to exercise benign global hegemony—gained a rebirth. In the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush embraced those illusions and made them the foundation of his global war on terror. The catastrophes that ensued testify eloquently to the enduring relevance of the warnings that Niebuhr had issued a half century earlier.
To correct the errors of the Bush era will require that Obama repudiate the illusions that gave rise to those errors in the first place. In that regard, Irony should serve as an essential text. A first rule of statecraft, Niebuhr writes, is to nurture a "modest awareness of the limits of our own knowledge and power." Modesty doesn’t imply passivity. It does mean curbing the inclination to portray our adversaries as evil incarnate while insisting that we ourselves are innocent and our purposes altruistic.
Niebuhr observed that "the pretensions of virtue are as offensive to God as the pretensions of power." After eight years that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and waterboarding, our pretensions of virtue look a bit worse for wear. The imperative of the moment is to manifest "a sense of contrition about the human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our own vanities."
Andrew J. Bacevich teaches at Boston University. His most recent book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.
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