Jen Psaki left the Biden White House after 16 months as press secretary. Saturday Night Live never savaged her, though Kate McKinnon played her. By that and other measures, Psaki compares favorably to Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, her predecessors from the years of Trump. A veteran of the Obama West Wing, before that a competitive collegiate swimmer, Psaki had the president’s ear and spoke with knowing authority.
Her press briefings were not cauldrons of rancor. Her tussles with Peter Doocey, the Fox News White House correspondent, never neared the boiling point. They played nice.
Unlike Karine Jean-Pierre, her successor, Psaki didn’t have to share the White House podium with John Kirby, spokesperson for the national security council and a retired rear admiral. Psaki was a force in her own right.
Now a host at MSNBC, Psaki is out with her first book. It mixes political vignettes with tips on navigating life’s competing demands, including how to dodge – and throw – sharp elbows. As a political memoir, it does its share of score-settling. But, true to its subtitle, Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World, Psaki’s book is not a tell-all, terribly newsy or an audition for a slot in a second Biden administration, if there is one.
To be expected, Psaki is critical of Donald Trump and his minions, but injects subtlety too. She wields a scalpel, lacerating Spicer and his former boss. She frames criticisms as career advice, not frontal assault.
“Shouldn’t [Spicer] have rejected the job offer, if he were truly credible?” she asks of the Republican official who had first go at speaking for Trump, perhaps the most thankless task yet invented in politics.
Great question. We all know the answer. As the anti-Trump operative Rick Wilson put it, everything Trump touches dies. Only Ivanka is safe and even then … who knows.
“While Sean may not have been acting entirely on his own behalf when he was giving his press briefings,” Psaki writes, “he was the one who suffered as a result.”
True. If Melissa McCarthy plays you in an SNL cold open, as she did Spicer, lampooning your loud parroting of your boss’s absurd lies … you’re screwed.
Then again, Spicer was kind of lucky. Banished from the Trumpian kingdom early on, he never suffered a January 6-related indictment. Eventually, he expressed regret for beclowning himself over the inauguration in 2017.
Back on Psaki’s own side of the aisle, Say More is no hagiography of Joe Biden. Psaki is aware of the president’s capacity for empathy but also mindful of his tendency to bring the story back to his own losses, most recently including that of Beau Biden, his late son who served in Iraq.
In summer 2021, amid the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suicide bomb at Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghans dead. Three days later, American bodies arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended. Things did not work out as planned.
Psaki conveys how Biden was stunned into silence when told that family members of dead Americans were complaining he had spent too much time talking about Beau, alleging he was insufficiently focused on the deaths of their own children.
“I paused for the president to respond,” Psaki writes. “The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.”
Biden finally responded, but did so “in a softer voice than usual”.
“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.
Again he paused: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”
Psaki also tweaks Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, and John Kerry, Barack Obama’s second secretary of state and until March a member of Biden’s administration as his climate envoy.
Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act was unpopular, viewed by many as another welfare scheme. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, a stock market crash and the mortgage crisis, Obamacare cost the Democrats both chambers of Congress.
“There were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy,” Obama later acknowledged to Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post.
One of those “outsiders” was Schumer. The New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all in on healthcare amid a meltdown in jobs and housing. Political prescience, however, isn’t always welcomed, let alone rewarded. Recalling how the White House rejected Schumer’s suggestion that Obama’s final State of the Union address contain a pitch for student loan relief, Psaki seems to delight in the outcome.
“I was telling [Obama] he needed to decide whether he wanted this to be his State of the Union speech, or Senator Schumer’s,” she recalls. “I delivered my thoughts calmly. My argument tapped into my knowledge of how the media would cover the speech. The president eventually agreed. Sorry, Senator Schumer.”
Psaki also recalls a gaffe made by Kerry in 2014. Responding to a question, he intimated that if conflict broke out between Japan and China, the US would use military force – a stance at odds with the stated American position.
“That was a huge mistake,’” chided David Wade, a longtime Kerry aide. Kerry didn’t yell back. Instead, he gave Psaki and Wade the green light to contact the White House and distance itself from his comments. In that moment, Psaki learned that being effective in her job meant delivering quick feedback, at times.
“Advising someone is not the same as appeasing them,” she writes.
The Biden administration has been relatively leak-free. Nothing approaching Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury or Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims, an early memoir by a Trump administration official, has appeared. Whether this matters come election day remains, of course, to be seen.
Say More is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
