Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America - Softcover

Reich, Robert B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593689143 ISBN 13: 9780593689141

Publisher: Vintage, 2026

Synopsis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From political economist, cabinet member, beloved professor, media presence, and bestselling author of Saving Capitalism and The Common Good, a deeply felt, compelling memoir of growing up in a baby-boom America that made progress in certain areas, fell short in so many important ways, and still has lots of work to do

"Important and galvanizing.” —Senator Bernie Sanders

"Essential reading for understanding this moment in American history.” —Molly Jong-Fast, New York Times bestselling author of How to Lose Your Mother

A thought-provoking, principled, clear-eyed chronicle of the culture, politics, and economic choices that have landed us where we are today—with irresponsible economic bullies and corporations with immense wealth and lobbying power on top, demagogues on the rise, and increasing inequality fueling anger and hatred across the country.

Nine months after World War II, Robert Reich was born into a united America with a bright future—which went unrealized for so many as big money took over our democracy. His encounter with school bullies on account of his height—4'11" as an adult—set him on a determined path to spend his life fighting American bullies of every sort. He recounts the death of a friend in the civil rights movement; his political coming of age witnessing the Berkeley free speech movement; working for Bobby Kennedy and Senator Eugene McCarthy; experiencing a country torn apart by the Vietnam War; meeting Hillary Rodham in college, Bill Clinton at Oxford, and Clarence Thomas at Yale Law. He details his friendship with John Kenneth Galbraith during his time teaching at Harvard, and subsequent friendships with Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy; and his efforts as labor secretary for Clinton and economic advisor to Barack Obama. Ultimately, Reich asks: What did his generation accomplish? Did they make America better, more inclusive, more tolerant? Did they strengthen democracy? Or did they come up short?

Reich hardly abandons us to despair over a doomed democracy. With characteristic spirit and humor, he lays out how we can reclaim a sense of community and a democratic capitalism based on the American ideals we still have the power to salvage.

About this title

About the Author

ROBERT B. REICH recently retired as Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three presidential administrations, Republican and Democrat, as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, and has written eighteen books, including The Work of Nations (translated into twenty-two languages) and the bestsellers The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, and Locked in the Cabinet. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a columnist for Newsweek and The Guardian, and writes a daily newsletter at https://robertreich.substack.com/. He is co-creator of the award-winning film Inequality for All and the Netflix original Saving Capitalism, and co-founder of Inequality Media. He lives in Berkeley.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Starters

My father, Ed Reich, was a medic during the Second World War. Fred Trump, Donald’s father, built barracks for Navy personnel. George W.’s father, George H.W., was a Navy pilot. Bill Blythe, who fathered Bill Clinton, repaired ships and tanks. At the end of the war, Ed, Fred, George, and Bill returned to Mildred Reich, Mary Anne Trump, Barbara Bush, and Virginia Blythe, respectively, to stoke what would be known as the postwar baby boom. More babies were born in 1946 than in any other year in American history to that time—­3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before. We were born into an America that felt proud of its war victory but also exhausted by the experience.

Surprising almost everyone, the nation emerged economically stronger. Almost all Americans had been put to work during the war and almost every factory was run at full capacity, ending the Great Depression more effectively than any of the many programs that President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched.

We were born to men and women whose futures were now filled with more possibility than they had ever known. They had survived the economic cataclysm of the Great Depression. They had been part of a nation that confronted and ended fascism. They had witnessed (and were soon to learn more about) the horrific results of genocide. Because they faced this together, it’s likely they felt more connected to other Americans of their generation than has any generation before or since. The GI Bill offered many a means to a college degree. The soaring postwar economy offered bountiful opportunity.

Black Americans and women, though, were still second-­class citizens. Black men had served in segregated units during the war. Millions of women, like my mother, had taken factory jobs, but with the end of the war many of their jobs were eliminated and new ones were filled by blue-­collar men. The rights of Black Americans and women, in the economy and our political system, would make for a central struggle in postwar America.

The war and the Depression decade before it had obliterated the fortunes of the Gilded Age. Industrial robber barons, monopolists, titans of Wall Street, and heirs to vast wealth lost almost everything they had accumulated or had it taxed away. The vast playing field of the American economy was greatly leveled, opening the way to the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

When I was a toddler, Ed had saved just enough money to rent a store on Lackawanna Avenue in Scranton and buy the only things he had learned to sell before the war—­women’s dresses, blouses, and stockings. The shop was called Beverly’s, named after his sister. His customers were the wives of factory workers. Most were now homemakers who helped save what they could of their husband’s paychecks and spent the rest.

When Donald was a toddler, Fred was a real estate developer in the Bronx who acquired a mortgage-­servicing company with access to the titles of many properties nearing foreclosure, which he bought cheaply and sold at a profit.

When little George W. was a toddler, George H.W. was in the oil business in Texas.

Bill’s father had been a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before Bill was born. Four years after Bill’s birth, Virginia married Roger Clinton, co-­owner of an automobile dealership.

What did Donald, George, Bill, I, and millions of other boomers do for the next seventy-­nine years? Did we make America better, more inclusive, more tolerant? Did we strengthen American democracy?

The beginning of an answer might be found in It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s ode to America, released to the public on December 21, 1946, the same year little Donald, George, Bill, and I were released on America.

It’s a Wonderful Life

If you don’t already know it, the movie’s central conflict is between Mr. Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore) and George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart). Potter is a greedy, cruel banker, in whose Social Darwinist view of America people compete with one another for scarce resources. Those who succeed deserve to win because they’ve outrun everyone else in that competitive race.

George is the generous, honorable head of Bedford Falls’ building-­and-­loan company, the one entity standing in the way of Potter’s total domination of the town.

After the death of George’s father, who founded the building-­and-­loan company, Potter—­who sits on the bank’s board—­seeks to dissolve it. Potter claims George’s father “was not a businessman. He was a man of high ideals, so-­called, but ideals without common sense can ruin a town.” For Potter, common sense is not coddling the “discontented rabble.”

To George, though, Bedford Falls is a community whose members help each other. He tells Potter that the so-­called “rabble . . . ​do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.” His father helped them build homes on credit so they could have a decent life. “People were human beings to him,” George tells Potter, “but to you, they’re cattle.”

When George accidentally loses some bank deposits that fall into Potter’s hands, the banker sees an opportunity to ruin George. This brings George to a bridge where he contemplates suicide, thinking his life has been worthless, before a guardian angel counsels him to think about what Bedford Falls would be like if George hadn’t been born—­poor, fearful, and completely dependent on Potter. The movie ends when everyone George has helped—­virtually the entire town—­pitches in to bail out George and his building-­and-­loan.

It’s a cartoon, of course—­both a utopian and a dystopian version of America—­but the cartoon poses a choice that’s become all too relevant. Do we join together or do we let the Potters of America own and run everything?

The movie, in that sense, was a prelude to modern Republican ideology. Since the political rise of Ronald Reagan, his party and the moneyed interests have used Potter-­like Social Darwinism to justify tax cuts for the wealthy, union-­busting, and cutbacks in social safety nets.

Above all, they have developed and executed a philosophy that has divided Americans (a kind of political Social Darwinism). That way, many Americans stay angry and suspicious of one another and don’t look upward to see where all the money and power have gone. And we don’t join together to claim it back.

What would Republicans and America’s moneyed interests say about It’s a Wonderful Life if it were released today? They’d probably call it socialist, maybe even communist, and it would make them squirm—­especially given the eerie similarity between Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter and you-­know-­who. As America has moved closer to being an oligarchy, with staggering inequalities of income, wealth, and power not seen in over a century, and closer to Trumpian neofascism (the two moves are connected, as I’ll make clear), It’s a Wonderful Life speaks to what’s gone wrong and what must be done to make it right.

When It’s a Wonderful Life was released, the FBI considered it evidence of Communist Party infiltration of the film industry. Either a movie was subversive or it wasn’t, and in the Bureau’s broad framing, this one certainly was. The organization handed over the results of its investigation to the House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC).

The FBI’s Los Angeles field office, using a report by an ad-­hoc group that included Fountainhead author and future Trump pin-­up girl Ayn Rand, warned that the movie represented “rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-­type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.” The movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. This . . . ​is a common trick used by Communists.” The Bureau’s report compared It’s a Wonderful Life to a Soviet film and alleged that Frank Capra, its director, was “associated with left-­wing groups” and that the film’s screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, were “very close to known Communists.”

This was all rubbish, of course, and a prelude to the witch hunt led by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of Hollywood, the State Department, and even the U.S. Army.

Few people got my father as riled up as Joe McCarthy.

My Father and the SOBs

My father called himself a liberal Republican in the days when such creatures still roamed the earth. He voted for Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential election (canceling my mother’s vote for Harry Truman) and then for Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956 (canceling my mother’s votes for Adlai Stevenson), and he thought highly of New York State’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, and one of its Republican senators, Jacob Javits, neither of whom would last a nanosecond in today’s GOP.

But Ed Reich could not abide political bullies. He gave up on the Republican Party when Richard Nixon became president. He would have detested Trump. (My father died nine months before Trump was elected to his first term of office.) He thought anyone who had to bully someone else to feel good about himself was despicable. If they did their bullying through politics, they were doubly despicable. In my father’s mind, political bullying had led to the Holocaust.

At the start of September 1947, my father moved us from Scranton to a small town some sixty miles north of New York City, South Salem, to be within driving distance of the two stores he then owned, in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Peekskill, New York. On Labor Day, just after we moved in, a delegation of older men came by our house. When they knocked on the door, my mother thought they were a welcoming committee and opened the door with a big “Hello!” But when she saw the expressions on their faces, she became alarmed.

She invited them into the living room and asked if they’d like coffee. They declined.

My father greeted them stiffly, suggesting they sit down. They did not.

“What’s this about?” he asked. “What’s happened? Is there a problem?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Reich,” one of them spoke gravely, “we’ve come to inform you that South Salem is a Christian community.”

There was a long pause. My father reddened.

“So, we’re not welcome here?” His voice was tight.

“Legally, you have a right to be here, of course,” the speaker said. (New York State had just enacted a law prohibiting homeowners from including “restrictive covenants” in their deeds that barred sales to “Negroes or Hebrews.”) “But we don’t think you and your family will be happy here.”

“Thank you for coming by,” my father said flatly, opening the front door for them. Then he exploded: “Now get the hell out of my house!”

That was the day my father decided we’d stay put in South Salem forever. “I showed those sons of bitches,” he said some years later.

—

“Son-­of-­a-­bitch!” was the worst epithet my father could hurl at someone. It burst out of him like a volcanic expulsion. For many years I didn’t know it contained separate En­glish words, including a term many would find offensive. To my young ears it might have been Russian or Yiddish, but it was frightening.

Joe McCarthy held a special place in Ed Reich’s pantheon of horrible people not only because he bullied those he claimed were members of the Communist Party, but because he did so with malice. McCarthy ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-­sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers.” Every time McCarthy’s image came across the six-­inch screen of the Magnavox television in our living room, my father would shout “Son-­of-­a-­bitch” so loudly it made me shudder.

McCarthyism was the by-­product of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal. The GOP had portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism,” and the Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

Southern segregationist Democrats joined in the red-­baiting. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who had filibustered to block anti-­lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Committee on Un-­American Activities (HUAC), called the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot” and feared it would give more voting rights to Black people. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”

The tactic was temporarily successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both the Senate and the House. Wisconsin ended its era of progressive Republicanism and sent McCarthy to the Senate. California replaced New Dealer Jerry Voorhis in the House with a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-­baiting as a political tool, Richard Nixon.

In December 1946, at the founding convention of the Progressive Citizens of America, Henry Wallace called the red scare a tool used by the most powerful economic forces in our country and warned us not to give in to it. “We shall . . . ​repel all the attacks of the plutocrats and monopolists who will brand us as Reds,” he said, adding: “If it is traitorous to believe in peace—­we are traitors. If it is communistic to believe in prosperity for all—­we are communists. If it is un-­American to believe in freedom from monopolistic dictation—­we are un-­American. We are more American than the neo-­fascists who attack us. The more we are attacked the more likely we are to succeed, provided we are ready and willing to counterattack.”

But, for years, there was no pushback. The red-­baiting escalated, encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI, and President Truman succumbed to the mounting hysteria. On March 21, 1947, he signed Executive Order 9835, which ushered in loyalty oaths and background checks and created the attorney general’s List of Subversive Organizations.

As the 1950 election approached, a New York Times headline announced that the “Left Is Silent in Campaign.” Even the American Civil Liberties Union, whose roots lay in the red scare of the World War I era, was reluctant to take the lead in opposing the threat to civil liberties in the second red scare. California representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, dubbed the “Pink Lady” for her supposed communist sympathies, ran for the Senate in 1950. She survived a bitter primary battle only to be beaten in November by Nixon.

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch watching the Army-­McCarthy hearings. The senator had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-­secret facility. He charged that one of the young attorneys on the staff of Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army, was a communist. The charge could destroy the young man’s career.

“Son-­of-­a-­bitch!” my father shouted. I hid my head.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593689143
• ISBN 13: 9780593689141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416