At last, a Cabinet member with a good sense of humor. In his “Locked in the Cabinet” Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, has put on paper the funniest and most instructive memoir ever written by a government official. The book presents a close-up view of the way things work and often don’t work at the highest governmental levels. The book is an interesting personal account by the man whose great ideas animated and inspired much of the 1992 Clinton’s campaign and who became the cabinet officer in charge of assisting regular Americans get better jobs. Robert Reich is a teacher, writer, social critic and a good friend of the Clintons since they were all in their twenties. He later became to be recognized as the “conscience” of the administration of Clinton and one of the most triumphant Labor Secretaries in the history. The book is a representation of his sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious chronicles of attempting to put ideals and ideas into practice.
He shows us labor leaders and business tycoons who clash with each other during the day and party together at nights. Reich portraits the president who aims to change America and his opponents who fight to keep it as it is or bring it back to where it used to be. Writer guides us to world of the pinnacles of power and pretentiousness where bills are being stalled or passed, secrets leaked, reputations built or damaged, numbers falsified, egos bruised, news stories twisted, hypocrisies uncovered and good intentions infrequently derail. On the other hand, the book bring us to the places in the country where those who are the objects of this drama are merely trying to get by, such as union halls, assembly lines, main town streets and big streets of central cities.
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"“Locked in the Cabinet” by Robert Reich Book Review".
“Locked in the Cabinet” starts with an account of Reich’s surgery that blurs flawlessly into the presidential campaign of Clinton when, from his hospital bed, he finds himself providing advice and ideas about the details of the campaign’s economic plan. Right after that author promptly recollects his first meeting with Clinton on a boat in 1968, and ends up at the introduction of the future president to his wife Claire. With all this taking place within the book’s first ten pages, one might anticipate such rapid-fire accounts to be piling up and leaving the reader without any sense of what is actually happening in the book. However, Reich returns to the strand introduced in these short recollections, and from these very short, entertaining and readable scenes creates a coherent and strong narrative. A solid example of his style of writing can be clearly seen in the way he describes his relationship with Clinton. Reader first sees Clinton through Reich’s recollection as a tall, sweet-faced fellow who holds a bowl of chicken soup in one hand and crackers in the other. However, later Clinton is portrayed as a man capable to ask for the next two months of Reich’s life. From these two episodes where two men are peers and where later one is asking another of complete devotion, Reich fills in gaps, to demonstrate, through ruminations and anecdotes, how they go from one point to the other, and how that influences the relationship between people who have known each other for many years. “Locked in the Cabinet” is a work that demonstrates the personal and the professional side and how sometimes they can be at odds with one another.
In between the work of the government and political relationships, Reich manages to combine his own vision of where America is going and what he considers people need to do to minimize the growing gap between rich and poor in America. He uses research and statistics to draw attention to his major points that the current income gap between rich and poor is growing and in order to reduce it state needs to invest more in people instead of the stock market by means of better training and education. But his most emotional and convincing arguments come not from his scholarly work, but from what he has seen and performed as the Secretary of Labor. Through his own eyes Reich shows programs that are truly working and making a difference in the lives of random people.
He shows a good example of young women who are taking part in an experimental work program that allows women to do jobs traditionally performed by men. These women tell their personal stories of how this program actually helped them make a living wage to be able to find decent housing and feed their children. In stark contrast to this episode, writer describes Al Donlap’s chopping and slashing as he buys out companies, downsizes and resells them, thus, making enormous profits for himself and his stakeholders while thousands of people who have lost their jobs struggle to find work. These stories allow recasting the soaring stock market and the “booming” economy to show who is actually profiting from these conditions and what people need to do in order to assist everyone benefit from this time of economic strength.
Striving to work for a more just society, laboring in a capital preoccupied with exorcising the deficit and maintaining Wall Street happy, Reich shows that Washington is not only different from the world of common citizens but eventually, and more importantly, precisely like it. “Locked in the Cabinet” shows us the world where Murphy’s Law reigns alongside the privileged and powerful but where hope astonishingly persists. Reich reveals triumphs to fill a lifetime and aggravation to fill two more. No matter what one thinks of Reich’s politics, he brilliantly shows the world with splendid richness of evidence, warmhearted candor and humor.
