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(dramatic music) - Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour & Co.
Here's what's coming up.
- Some 45 million additional people would be pushed into extreme hunger if this situation continues and that is what we now see unfolding.
- As war disrupts the world's critical shipping routes, aid agencies warn that millions more could be pushed toward hunger.
I speak to Carl Scow, acting executive director of the World Food Program, about the challenges of delivering aid in the world's biggest crises.
Then.
- It's beautiful and also tragic.
It'll chew you up, but also lift you up.
And that churn, that energy of the city is what I love about it.
- Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Colson Whitehead, joins me to discuss his new novel, "Cool Machine," and how fiction can illuminate the moral questions of our time.
- This is a sea change in American lives and it did not come about because the American people changed their minds, right?
- Michelle Martin speaks to Peter Canellos, veteran legal journalist and author of "Revenge for the '60s" about how the conservative legal movement reshaped America's Supreme Court.
♪♪ Amanpour & Co.
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Thank you.
- Welcome to the program, everyone.
I'm Bianna Goldriga, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.
As the Iran war escalates, the world's most vital choke points are coming under increasing threat.
Iran's disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has already rattled global energy markets.
Now, the Houthis could obstruct things further, launching a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea and threatening to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
The two narrow waterways carry not only oil and gas, but also vast quantities of food and humanitarian supplies.
Aid agencies warn that if these lifelines are shut down, the consequences could be catastrophic, pushing millions more people towards hunger.
And yet, amid all of this, there is one encouraging sign.
New UN figures show global hunger declined for a third consecutive year in 2025.
But that progress remains fragile.
Nearly 645 million people still go hungry, and one in three people worldwide cannot afford a healthy diet.
My first guest has traveled to many of the world's worst humanitarian hotspots, from Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan and beyond, witnessing both the scale of the suffering and the difficulties of delivering aid.
Carl Scow is Acting Executive Director of the UN's World Food Program and joins me from New York.
Carl, welcome to the program.
So, let's start with this optimistic report.
The U.N.
releasing its report on the state of food security in the world, and it is showing that global hunger declined for a third straight year.
But these gains are fragile, they're slow and uneven.
And I know you've described this moment as a perfect storm where you have record high levels of acute hunger colliding with historic drops in funding.
So talk about your concerns that when you look at just that base headline that global hunger has dropped, that interest, perhaps in donating money, also drops.
I think it's important to distinguish because what this report speaks to is the chronic hunger, which includes big developing countries.
I think the improvements are mainly driven by improvements in India and a few other contexts.
But on the other hand, when it comes to acute food insecurity, which is driven by shocks, conflict or extreme weather events or earthquakes, those numbers are going up.
We see some 300 million people acutely food insecure.
That's a tripling from only the past five years.
And so, you know, in that regard, we are seeing the situation worsen.
It's driven by conflict mainly, but it's also driven by extreme weather events.
And as you said, I've traveled to some of these front lines over the past few weeks.
And I think what gets lost is often that human dimension, the human tragedies across all these conflicts, and how families really are disrupted, and how people are not -- and we're talking about millions of people here -- don't know where their next meal is going to come from.
And let's talk about some of these front lines.
Arguably, the most devastating is Sudan.
That's the world's largest displacement crisis right now.
About 20 million people face crisis-level hunger.
The World Food Program has resources to help just 3 to 5 million of those vulnerable.
In June, you described visiting a camp of 700,000 siege survivors.
And you say, quote, it's an ocean of grass hunts to the horizon where food convoys come maybe every other month.
And the food lasts just two to three weeks.
This is a very difficult question and challenge for you.
How do you decide who gets the food?
I mean, number one on Sudan, just to say that our focus in the last few weeks has really been on the situation in Kordovan, where fighting has escalated and we see huge risks to the city of El Obeid.
We have been focusing on that to pre-position to support these newly displaced people.
And, you know, there has been some progress but I want to really give attention to that situation.
There needs to be an international mobilization to avoid further atrocities in the Kordovan.
What you refer to is the situation in Darfur.
There are massive displacements since last year and people are now stuck, displaced in huge camps and the assistance is not enough.
We see security and access challenges around Sudan, but right now what we also see is a funding crisis.
This has moved from being an access crisis and a security crisis to one which is both access and funding.
We used to be able to support some 5 million people in Sudan.
We're now down to 3.5, and we are worried that we will need to cut even further.
And how this looks like, I mean, we have already targeted the absolute most needy, people who are at risk of famine.
And so, you know, these are women, women headed households, widowed women with many children who have nowhere else to turn.
And we are now cutting, you know, we have gone from cutting from full rations to 70% of the rations down to 50%.
And now we're going to have to also cut off some areas totally.
So if access is not the biggest impediment right now, but funding, how do you get that funding?
Who is it the United States?
Which country is the dominant supplier?
And we've spent so much time talking about Sudan and how it's become more of a forgotten crisis.
That's another challenge that you're facing.
I mean, the cuts we see, frankly, is across the board from our traditional donors.
And I think, you know, what we really need is a political commitment.
I think everyone agrees that we shouldn't let children die of starvation.
No child should go to bed hungry.
But we need now to turn that kind of overall agreement into action.
And that has to be done on several fronts.
Number one, of course, to try to bring an end to some of these conflicts.
I mean, in Sudan, what we really need is a ceasefire.
We need a humanitarian pause so that we can operate and reach everyone in need.
Secondly, we need the kind of funding that helps us work flexibly to, if possible, act in advance.
Right now, when we see risks in Cordoba, for example, that we can pre-position food, bring in food to the areas where we have access so that they are well maintained should the fighting cut off our supply lines.
And thirdly, of course, the volume of funding.
So this is really, you know, it needs diplomatic efforts.
It needs funding.
It needs the kind of funding that helps us be agile enough to find ways to get to people.
But really, at the bottom of this is to kind of turn that consensus, that agreement that children should not go to bed hungry into political action.
Let's talk about another crisis, and that is what's developing and what has been ongoing in the Middle East.
We'll get to Iran in a moment, but obviously the war in Gaza.
You have been to Gaza repeatedly since 2023.
After your fourth visit, you called it the worst that you had seen.
Now that this tentative ceasefire has been in place, the World Food Program has reached over one million Palestinians a month, but I know conditions still remain fragile.
Is food actually able to get to the people in Gaza who need it most?
I mean, since the ceasefire, WFP have been able to deliver.
We have reached almost the entire population every month.
And thanks to those humanitarian efforts, we have been able to make progress and somewhat stabilize the food security situation.
But I think at the same time, it's important to say that that progress is fragile, because it is thanks to that humanitarian effort.
And should that for some reason be cut off?
Well, we would quickly return to two situations we saw about a year ago.
And I think it's also important to point to other sectors like water and sanitation and shelter, where we have not seen that same progress.
And I think further, you know, we would like to go beyond, of course, what we really hope for is that there is progress on the political front.
But more importantly, that we can begin to support recovery efforts on the food side that we can get more commercial sector food in so we can extend our programs to give cash to people so that we begin rebuilding some kind of domestic food system.
That's really what we're pushing for on the food side.
But it's important also to recognize that we have SWFP and on the food side we have been able to make progress.
And that is very encouraging to hear.
Obviously, the ultimate goal is lasting peace so that the rebuilding process can begin in earnest and there can be consistent supplies of food, medical supplies, etc.
After a recent visit to Jerusalem, you said Gaza, while it remains brutal, the West Bank is deteriorating as well.
We've been spending a lot of time covering the West Bank there and the settlements and violence there from settlers and increased violence we've seen.
But I'm not sure many people when they think of the West Bank think of food insecurity as well.
Just explain what you've picked up on.
I mean, this is mainly a political protection, human rights crisis, of course.
But there are also humanitarian and food impacts when people are displaced, when their livelihoods are disrupted.
And so we are providing support to kind of alleviate some of that suffering that is a result of what's going on there.
But mainly what needs to happen here is that there is, you know, political action taken to reverse some of these situations.
But in the meantime, we play our role to try to alleviate the suffering and to make sure that families have to provide for themselves, at least when it comes to food.
- Karl, as we're traveling the world with all of these hot spots and ongoing wars, the war in Ukraine is something we need to talk about as well, now entering its fifth year.
You've spent time with the World Food Program distribution teams near the front lines in Ukraine last Friday.
Your warehouse in Dnipro was hit by Russian drones four times in a single day.
That was the seventh strike on clearly marked WFP facilities in three months.
At this point, given that these facilities are clearly marked as humanitarian, do you believe your teams are being deliberately targeted?
Well, I think what's important to point out first is that the people living on the front lines of every conflict, but certainly also in Ukraine, are really suffering.
And I feel sometimes that human dimension, that humanitarian and human suffering is lost in the overall discussions on the politics, on the military strategy, on the weapon systems.
And so, you know, I think more attention needs to be put on those hundreds of thousands suffering from these conflicts.
And now in Ukraine, with this intensified drone attacks that are happening daily.
I mean, secondly, yes, humanitarian workers are at increased risk, and that includes Ukraine.
We have seen more incidents this year in Ukraine than we have for the entire year, last year, and that was a record year in this long war.
And so certainly with this intensified fighting, our colleagues are also at more risk.
And the fact that our warehouse are being hit is just absolutely unacceptable.
I think what I'm worried about also now is the increasing activity in the Black Sea.
I mean, we see now, you know, both the Hormuz, Strait of Hormuz, the coastlines outside Yemen and in the Black Sea, the freedom of navigation is a threat.
And that is also driving up food insecurity and disrupting supply chains across the world.
So, you know, what we see in Ukraine represents also a broader issue where people are suffering, humanitarians are at risk and these wars are also driving up global food insecurity, having implications far beyond, including in Southern Africa and other far away places.
Well, let's connect those two.
I'm glad you mentioned the Black Sea.
The Odessa port has been a vital passageway.
It's always been viewed as the breadbasket to much of Europe and the world.
You have that being at risk of being closed down at the same time as we've talked about with the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, now perhaps threats on another Saudi passageway as well.
How concerned are you about the impact that that could have on so many countries in desperate need of food that are facing insecurities, food insecurities daily if now you have both the Black Sea port and the Strait of Hormuz and possibly Bandar Al-Bab also closed as well?
I mean we're extremely, extremely worried about this.
We saw what happened when the war in Ukraine started, how that sent shockwaves across the globe in terms of access to fertilizer, the price of food.
We saw similar developments when the war in the Gulf started and, you know, that is, we are really worried that the ceasefire is not holding and that this will continue.
We had estimated that some 45 million additional people would be pushed into extreme hunger if this situation continues.
And that is what we now see unfolding.
We've already registered some 20 additional million people acutely food insecure.
So extremely worried.
And in a place like Sudan, where I just visited, you know, you see this playing out.
You have on one hand, the tight correlation between price of energy and food.
So food er prices are going up 30-40% and people who have nothing really eat 30-40% less and hence are walking hungry.
But in addition to that, all the fertilizer in Sudan came from the Gulf.
That is now off and planting season has started and we are really worried that production will come down in the next three to six months.
And on top of that, food prices when they shoot up in that way have all kinds of implications.
The agriculture in Sudan is driven by irrigation.
That irrigation is pumped by diesel and when the price come up, the farmers don't afford it and frankly they lose their crops.
So, you know, this crisis of increased energy prices, of disrupted supply chains and the lack of fertilizer is going to have a heavy impact on food security around the globe.
And that is happening at a time when we also see El Nino building up.
This weather phenomena caused also by climate change that is going to impact across the globe.
I was just in Central America Guatemala and El Salvador.
We're in the center and the dry corridor of Central America.
They are already feeling the hit of El Nino the drought where farmers told me they've lost their crops already.
And so you know these are layers here of crisis that are building up and the world needs to pay attention because ultimately food security is also about stability.
And so we need to attend to this from a humanitarian imperative but also from a security imperative.
And climate change a big angle here as well.
Let's try to end on some optimistic news if possible.
And that seems to be coming from Latin America now as a good news story.
Hunger is down for a third since 2020.
That's faster than anywhere on the earth on earth that we've seen.
What are they getting right there and can it be replicated?
I think there is a lot to learn from Latin America.
I think there are still big challenges though including the affordability of healthy diets.
I was just now as I mentioned in Guatemala and El Salvador and there they now talk about a double burden.
On one hand they are still working on malnutrition among children but also they are now you know increasingly having to address obesity and in some instances it's happening at the same time.
And so I think you know yes there has been improvements to access of food but we now are entering into new challenges in terms of what kind of food people have you know are affording to eat.
So so the nutrition issue in Latin America remains a big challenge.
But let me you know end on a more positive note and that is what I'm seeing also across where the issue of bringing school meals, having meals in schools is something that is really picking up across the world.
And this is having a massive positive impact and something that you know we are from the World Food Programme trying to promote because it is something that has such transformative impact in many countries including big developing countries like Brazil, India and so forth.
That is encouraging to hear and hopefully that can be replicated around the world.
Carl Skjall, thank you for the time.
Thank you for all that you do.
Thank you very much.
Now to a literary giant.
From the Underground Railroad to the Nickel Boys, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead has established himself as one of the world's most original and thoughtful writers.
With his ability to subvert genre, examine America's past and present, and humanize the black experience with humor and irony.
And now the conclusion of his celebrated Harlem crime trilogy has hit shelves and to rave reviews.
In "Cole Machine," aging protagonist and furniture salesman Ray Carney decides to undertake one last heist navigating crime and business in 1980s New York.
Colson Whitehead joined me here in New York to discuss how he uses fiction to explore the moral and political questions of our time.
Colson Whitehead, welcome back to the program.
I feel like we've been together through the inception of this trilogy here.
I interviewed you after "Harlem Shuffle."
I interviewed you with "Crook Manifesto," and now here we are with "Cool Machine."
- Yeah, the last one is done.
I mean, if I had hobbies, I would do something else, but I just like working.
- Well, it's understandable, given the character here, and Ray Carney in particular.
What is it that three books can tell about his storyline that one book couldn't?
- Well, it becomes bigger than him.
It becomes the supporting cast steps up.
The city becomes a character and we get this real sort of panorama of the city.
And so over the 30 years of his life, we follow him in the sixties, seventies and eighties.
We really get to see that evolution of his character and, and the other characters as well.
You have been known for switching up genres throughout your book, serious novels, comic novels, fiction, nonfiction.
But you've really stuck with the Harlem Trilogy here since the Nickel Boys.
Did you think you would be investing so much time in this story?
Definitely when you write a trilogy, there's a lot of words.
Like, a lot of words in one book.
And to write a trilogy is literally three times as many words.
A thousand plus pages.
Yeah, so I didn't know what I was getting into.
But I love the character and the world.
And definitely people sort of stepped up and became more important.
And I gave them their space.
And so it evolved in a very lovely way.
It's been a challenging, but also very fulfilling project.
- And the books are thrillers, crime capers, fun reads, a little bit of humor in them as well.
You depict Harlem in an extraordinary way though.
I mean, Harlem itself is its own character through a number of generations here in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
You were born in the 60s.
I know you drew a lot of inspiration from research, but also your own parents.
Just talk about you having to maybe reflect to your own childhood now, in writing about what the '80s in New York was like.
- Yeah, I was born in '69, and so the last part of "Crook Manifesto," bicentennial year, 1976, I have sort of vague memories.
I'm definitely more connected to the '80s.
That's when I came of age culturally.
I was a teenager.
I was living uptown.
I would go down to the village to buy Susie Nibanchi t-shirts and records.
And it was a great time of discovery.
And so I had more to draw on from my personal experience.
I gave shout outs to various record stores and bars I used to go to in college.
And so it was less archeology and more preserving in a more active way, the New York of the 80s.
- And were there reflections from your own childhood that you realized again in writing this book?
Obviously it's not telling your life story, but it's in a city where you grew up.
- Yeah, I mean, I've always keep coming back to New York City in different ways.
Sometimes my first book, "The Intuitionist" about elevator inspectors for some reason is more of an allegorical take on New York.
And I really wanted to get a realistic depiction.
And so I'm drawing from vague memories of the early '70s.
So it's very dirty.
New York was not in a good place.
But also narrating New York in the '80s.
The fiscal crisis is over.
Wall Street's coming back.
There's a lot of development and money floating around.
And so I was very young, but I felt the change in energies over the years.
And how did your research for this book differ from the previous two?
I did a lot of walking around for the first two books.
I lived in Harlem when I was very little, and so I would location scout.
You know, this is Carney's office, maybe.
This block looks depressing.
Maybe that's where he grew up.
Where do you dump a body?
You know, I was often preoccupied with where would I dump a body if I was Carney or Pepper?
So things like that.
And Carney really has achieved such a pinnacle professionally here.
He's a business owner now, successful business owner, and yet still a master fence.
You can't get the fence out of him.
Why?
Well, he's he's settled.
His real business, he sells furniture, is, you know, going fine.
Wins awards?
He wins awards.
He's Northwest Regional Dealer of the Year.
He's very proud of And his fencing sideline is, you know, sort of quiet and he keeps it up.
But there's an emptiness.
He's an empty nester.
His kids have gone to college.
His footsteps echo into brownstone.
And so, really, this is a question about what's next.
He's middle-aged.
He's achieved a certain amount of success.
And now what?
And here we are, and you talk about the evolution of these three books from the '60s in Harlem Shuffle, the '70s Crook Manifesto, Cool Machine ends in the late '80s.
You were out and about in the city and the nightclubs.
Tell us about nightlife in the 1980s New York.
- Well, it centers on, in this book, 1983, Lower East Side, East Village, and there's this great cross-pollinization between musicians, no-wave and post-punk musicians like ESG, Liquid Liquid, very, you know, kind of obscure, very great, and filmmakers and artists like Basquiat, and they're all hanging out in the same place, they're listening to the same music, going to the same clubs, dating the same people.
Basquiat went out with Madonna, and he was a great friend of mine.
And so I was a bit young.
I started going downtown later.
But it really was such a wonderful time to be in the city and soak up all this culture.
And so much of your work had focused on Harlem.
But explain to those that are not New Yorkers of what a different world one finds when they venture just a mile or two downtown, and what that experience is like to get on your first subway ride to go to the Lower East Side.
It was a great adventure.
And I think if you look at pictures now of the Lower East Side in the 80s compared to now, of course, there's a lot of condos, the vacant lots are gone, but it really was apocalyptic in those days.
And one of the things I'm trying to narrate is that changing city.
Things are always being destroyed, torn down, and something new comes in its place.
And that's buildings and blocks, but also people's lives.
We're all going through our own metamorphosis, our changes in our life circumstance.
And if you follow a character for 30 years, you can really take in that view.
- And wow, what a change in circumstance.
What a confluence of so many events at the same time in the 1980s.
You had the Reagan years, time of yuppies.
You had shiny new skyscrapers going up.
You had an economic crisis.
You had a crime on the rise here in New York as well.
The AIDS epidemic.
How important was telling that part of the story?
I want to be truthful to the city and the life of the city.
And so there's a lot of money sloshing around in the early '80s, but also it's the rise of the homelessness problem.
At the end of the '80s, there is the crack epidemic, the height of the AIDS epidemic.
So even when we're on an upswing, you know, it's New York, so we're going to come down.
And capturing that is really important to me.
You start the book with a vivid description of New York in 1981, the pivot from the Bronx's burning in the 70s to Reagan 80s, how am I doing, Ray Koch?
And it actually reminded me a little bit of the book, "Gods of New York" from last year and sort of what New York was like at that time.
Can you read a section of the book on that?
Sure, yeah.
"New York City in 1981.
The city that year was true to its personality, as malformed across the centuries.
A monstrous entity powered by innate miseries, operated by brute will, and held together by pluck, fury, and rebar.
It had been flat broke, and now clambered from the crater of debt, one mucky handhold at a time.
Crime and its ingenuity devised new permutations daily, making every citizen a victim or a witness.
It was dirty and sick and plain spoken in its threats.
"How am I doing?"
the mayor asked on his rounds, barking like one of the mangy seals installed at the decrepit and neglected Central Park Zoo, a real dump.
It was his trademark.
Everybody needs a gimmick.
How am I doing?
The same as everyone else, tired, banged up, but staggering forth somehow.
So how does that passage set up the rest of the story?
It's a time of survivors.
You know, we're all sort of beaten up by circumstances and life sometimes.
And we're clambering, you know, handhold by handhold out of the pit.
And so that's where we find Carney entering into this new stage.
And one last heist as well for Carney.
At the Waldorf Astoria, of all places, what made you want to knock off one of the grandest hotels in New York?
The crimes in the first two books are very sort of low technology, very sweaty guys.
They're hunched over the safe.
And it's the last book.
It's the '80s.
And so I was talking to my friend, and he said, "You know, you got to go big."
And so the crimes are bigger.
There's a bigger scale, bigger stakes.
And I really wanted to, you know, wrap up the story properly.
And as we talked about the second act, you head downtown to the Lower East Side.
Your character Pepper is a veteran Harlem criminal, lands in the East Village club scene in 1983.
Why leave the neighborhood of Harlem?
It's a Harlem trilogy, but if I could have called it the New York trilogy, I would have, but Paul Auster took that.
So it's about cities in general, and I think there's a way of the way we feel about big cities.
You can be in Paris or Sao Paulo or Stockholm, and I think I'm evoking that same sort of thing.
So we pull back and get a bigger idea of the scale of corruption and the crimes and we're not just confined to Harlem.
And obviously a novel but landmark real fixtures from hotels to restaurants to Ukrainian diners are mentioned in this book, Second Avenue.
Kyiv versus Vyasylka.
Vyasylka is still around.
Kyiv is not.
If it would be, it probably would be a different spelling now that it's an independent country.
You've long confessed that you're more of a Kyiv guy.
Yeah, I worked at the Village Voice, a newspaper, and I was just a few blocks away.
So I remember they had a great mushroom barley soup on my lunch break.
Better than Besikles.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's talk about Pepper.
To some, he is a stone-cold sociopath.
Others, he's a top thief with questionable people skills.
He's a little bit older now, so relying a little bit on some Pepto-Bismol throughout his storyline, and now on a macrobiotic diet as well.
Carney obviously is a protagonist here, but there is a special affection that a reader develops for Pepper.
Tell us more about Pepper.
He's a great foil for Ray.
And he demanded his own space, and so I gave that to him over the three books.
Carney's a family man.
Pepper is an isolated person.
He has a different idea of being a person in the world, a different idea of crime.
Between the two of them, we get a really much broader view of some of the themes in the book.
He's a sociopath, but you know, he's a nice sociopath.
He's growing as a person over 30 years.
He doesn't take a beating as well as he used to, but who does?
He holds a special place in Elizabeth's heart, clearly, as well.
Ray's wife and his longtime partner, who he's been supporting for so many years.
And this, at least for him, is the excuse that he goes back into fencing to help his wife.
How much does she actually know about his alternate life here?
Because she's away, she goes on business trips.
But how is she not aware that this is what's happening?
Well, you know, she'll go away for business and come back and he's been beaten up.
And you can only say you've been mugged so many times.
And so, you know, she sort of looks the other, looks the other way.
She understands his, you know, his, his real, his real character and, and gives him some, some leeway.
I've committed to writing about 30 years into someone's life.
And that means their, their spouse and their kids as well.
And so Elizabeth starts off working in a travel agency, a green book type travel agency, takes her own business on as a female entrepreneur in the late 70s, early 80s, can't get loans.
And so I'm trying to bring in her sort of feminist struggle and depict that too.
That was going on at the same time as all this other stuff in the book.
- And their two children, John and May.
John's in college and May is spending time overseas in Europe.
- As a father yourself, I'm wondering how much you reflect on how your kids see New York today versus the New York that you grew up in, and how do we see that through the lens of May and John's relationship in the city?
- Well, I think they're eager New Yorkers.
I think, you know, it's a very special place to grow up, and I'm glad that they had that experience.
I was more free range in the '70s, you know?
We don't just let them loose in Central Park like we used to.
But, you know, I definitely use some of my own empty nest feelings to animate Ray Carney, my oldest one at the college, and definitely the house is a little more empty.
And you have to face, you know, the fact that, you know, things are changing and you're getting older and your kids are moving on.
- The book, in terms of the reviews, which have been phenomenal.
So congratulations on that.
But they tend to call your Harlem books nostalgic.
You tell it all though.
The rats, the sewers, the garbage, the crime.
Is nostalgia the right word here?
Because on the one hand it does seem to be a love story to a city that is like no other.
But you don't hold back either.
No, I'm trying to be truthful.
It's a Valentine, but also with a body count.
And so I'm not shying away.
I'm not shying away from how the city actually is.
It's beautiful and also tragic.
It'll chew you up, but also lift you up.
And that churn, that energy of the city is what I love about it.
And if I can depict it, you know, I'm doing my job.
- You write, "Justice, Kearney has never seen the thing in his whole life and didn't know what it looked like.
Revenge, plenty, but justice, not once."
In all three books, Carney has never seen justice, only revenge.
Is that Carney's conclusion?
Is it yours?
Well, you know, I'm sort of, I'm a glass half-empty kind of guy.
I have to adopt different philosophies depending on who I'm seeing the world through, whether it's Carney or Pepper.
Definitely Ray has a different idea of justice.
To answer your question, yeah, I think so.
I think so.
Well, the trilogy ends where it begins with Freddy, the cousin that Carney couldn't save.
Is rescuing Robert Carney's shot at redemption here?
Robert is Freddy's son, Carney's nephew.
And he failed to save his cousin in the Harlem Shuffle.
30 years later, he's faced with the same situation.
Robert has gotten himself into trouble.
And the question is, yes, can he right this wrong?
Is he responsible?
How much is Robert in control of his fate?
And so that's where we find, you know, Ray again, at the end of this trilogy, reenacting some of the primal questions from the first book.
- And throughout the book, Ray Carney keeps staring at a poster for Escape from New York, and this is the 1981 dystopia thriller about a lawless future city.
Does Carney actually want out of New York, or is this always going to be where he stays?
He's always walking through the city and seeing ads and posters and ruminating.
And so when he sees the poster for "Escape from New York, 1981," you know, he's a diehard New Yorker.
So he's like, "How could you escape from New York?
And where would you go?"
Like, you know, he's perplexed.
And so we keep coming back to this question, can you escape yourself?
Can you escape your hometown, who you are?
And he's trying to figure that out.
- So you've written about the '60s, '70s, '80s, so much happened in the city in the '90s as well, in the early aughts in particular.
Any more books coming about New York in particular in those eras?
- I have an idea now for something that takes place in the early 20th century.
So going back again.
The closer I get to the present, you know, I feel like I've done that in my earlier books.
And so going back into the past and writing historical novels has been really rejuvenating for me.
I can't rely on my rhetorical props or my my ideas of how we live now.
So writing about the past really pushes me to get out of my comfort zone.
Well, keep writing.
Keep writing.
It makes us happy to read your work.
Some are calling this the book of the year.
So, congratulations.
It has been quite a journey to follow you and to follow Ray Carney and his story as well.
It's been a lot of fun.
Thank you so much for joining us.
The U.S.
Supreme Court has become one of the most powerful and polarizing institutions in American life.
From abortion and presidential power to guns, its decisions have reshaped the country.
But today's conservative majority did not emerge overnight.
According to veteran legal journalist Peter Canellos, it is the culmination of a decades-long movement that transformed the federal judiciary.
Michelle Martin spoke with Canellos about his new book, "Revenge for the '60s" and what this year's Supreme Court term reveals about the court today.
Thanks Bionna.
Peter Canellos, thank you so much for talking with us.
Thank you, Michelle.
The Supreme Court just wrapped up another consequential term.
Your new book, "Revenge for the '60s," revenge for the '60s, that's important.
Sam Alito and the triumph of the conservative legal movement examines the forces that shaped today's courts.
Before we get into the book, how would you sum up this term?
Was there a through line for you as a person who's been watching the court for a long time?
Well, this was the term where we were gonna find out if the conservative justices were gonna truly be a bulwark against President Trump's desire to stretch his executive authority.
I think it's fine to say his dictatorial ambitions, he's used that term himself.
And it's always been a question, would the conservative justices, who came from a very different place, they are a conservative influence on our society, but they're not the same as MAGA.
Would they rein in Trump?
And I think the answer was a partial yes on the birthright citizenship case on tariffs.
In a few instances, they did, but Sam Alito did not.
And Sam Alito kind of led a dissenting opposition on that score that sets him up as kind of the pro-MAGA justice in a way.
So I feel like we got an indication that the conservative justices are willing to be tough on Trump, but it's sort of gonna be deferred, I think, until the next term and perhaps even the term after that to see just how much of a bulwark against Trump they will be.
- You know, your book is so interesting because it's not a conventional biography.
Most biographies kind of weave in the significant events of the person being profiled's life, but the person is foregrounded.
Your book is kind of the opposite because you use the life and career of Justice Alito to tell the story of the movement that shaped him, which is fascinating.
You actually start out with the legal theory that Sam Alito is most identified with, which is originalism.
You say he wasn't the first self-described originalist to join the Supreme Court, but he was the most emblematic.
First of all, what is originalism?
And then of course, I'm gonna ask you to tell me, why is he the one that helps us understand what it means?
- Yeah, well, I think that your question is generated because my impetus for writing the book was to write about the rise of the conservative legal movement.
The conservative legal movement in 40 years has really taken over our justice system.
There's a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.
There's close to a majority among all federal judges.
When you think of all of the landmark changes of the last few years in affirmative action, in voting rights, in abortion, in the EPA and the ability of independent agencies to regulate the economy, this is a sea change in American lives.
And it did not come about because the American people changed their minds, right?
The poll numbers are almost the same as they were 40 years ago.
And all of those issues, it's the point that's changed.
And this has been a very successful, very disciplined movement that has succeeded in doing something we've never seen before in our history, to have an actual movement come in and take over.
So the reason that I say Sam Bolita was not the first originalist, but he's the first to come out of this pipeline, is that 40 and 50 years ago, as this movement was getting started, one of the goals was to create a sort of regular pipeline of reliable conservatives.
You may remember that a lot of the Republican appointees had been accused of sort of going native in Washington and becoming liberals and things like that.
And so the goal of this movement, whether it came through the Federalist Society, but also through Ed Meese's term as Attorney General and many of the leaders, Leonard Leo, who has driven this movement.
The goal was to take people when they are young, as far as young as law students, have them become believers in a sort of originalist philosophy, which has an intellectual appeal, and came out of it, and then qualify them at a very early age and put them on a path that can lead them to Supreme Court.
So let's go back to this whole question of originalism.
How did originalism start?
- Yeah, well, I think, I mean, one aspect of the revenge for the '60s was conservative anger at the Warren court.
Now, the Warren court was not a group of all self-described liberals who were part of a movement who were appointed to bring about a certain result.
They were white men until Thurgood Marshall joined, and they had come up in court, majority of them Republican appointees, from all these different walks of life.
But they sort of coalesced at a moment of great social change, and they liberalized the law in a lot of ways, starting with Brown v. Board of Education, the desegregation case in 1954.
And even though Chief Justice Warren had retired by that time, it sort of ended in 1973 with Roe v. Wade.
But during that 19-year period, there were tremendous liberalizations in things like freedom from intrusive police searches and the Miranda warnings and separation of church and state.
All of these things moved to the left.
And many conservatives fell with some degree of conviction.
And the court was sort of taking on this central role in American life, and these unelected judges were pushing things to the left.
So part of their movement was we need to set some boundaries around the court and the law.
And that's what originalism came in.
It's like, we should not be looking at the Constitution as a living document the way some liberals do.
And we should not be looking at these open-ended provisions in the Constitution, like the liberty language of the 14th Amendment, which was where Roe v. Wade was sort of found.
We should be thinking more about the original intent or the original meaning of the Constitution and setting some real boundaries in terms of reading the text of the Constitution and being rigorous about what these provisions were meant to say and what they were not meant to say.
I think that's where originalism came out.
Tell us a little bit about his background and why was he attracted to originalism?
I think that Sam Alito is emblematic of the larger group of people that have been driving the conservative legal movement.
And when you trace it all back, a disproportionate number of them come from the great wave of European immigration that occurred in the 20th century.
These were not rich people generally.
They were people who went to public school education.
They were taught the sort of greatness of the Declaration of Independence, the greatness of the Constitution.
And if you're a kid like San Bolito, whose parents were, and grandparents, were Italian immigrants and had faced a fair amount of discrimination and poverty and deprivation, but told him, you know, they did it all for him so that he would be able to live up to his full potential as an American.
And then you have the, add to that the patriotism of the Cold War, add to that the regular churchgoing moral values of the Catholic Church.
And it became in his mind this kind of American tradition that he honors and that he wants to see enforced under the law.
When he was 18, he was the valedictorian of his high school.
He was the head of the student council.
He was the leader of the editor of the college newspaper, the high school newspaper.
But everything started to change, right, at that moment.
That's when you had the Martin Luther King riots in Trenton, a particularly violent set of riots right after the assassination of Dr.
King, in which a whole swath of Trenton was destroyed, in which a young activist, actually a peacemaking activist, was killed by police.
It was a very dramatic, traumatic kind of event.
And you see in the very last issue that he was the editor of, of the college newspaper, a sort of cry from the heart editorial, decrying the anarchy.
Going to Princeton, he felt very successful, but it was a time of great turbulence, right?
He was the last all-male class to enter Princeton.
And by sophomore year, when women arrived, it was the social life of campus changing.
Conversations were about things like contraception, abortion, you know, couples of premarital sex.
And he was forced to defend in these sort of dorm room bull sessions, you know, his conservative values, his Catholic-based conservative values.
And, you know, people say that was that was discomforting for him.
His classmates say that.
In addition, he was in ROTC.
He was one of 27 students in the Army ROTC at a time when the Nixon administration invaded Cambodia and this was a dramatic escalation seen as an escalation of the fighting in Vietnam.
There was a massive student demonstration, a massive student strike, exams were canceled and for the first time people said they saw Alito offering political opinions and he was he was upset he felt injured that exams were canceled because he had studied up and he was gonna get straight A's in his mind and that's what he needed to do to get ahead.
And here are the faculty and students canceling and saying there's a larger issue here.
So I think some sense of needing to rein in these forces of social change came out of that era.
I also think for Alito and for other people, you know, keep in mind these are the meritocrats.
These are the people carrying with them the hopes and dreams of their parents and grandparents.
And they saw, I think, for the first time that they were at odds with their generation.
So one of the ways that people may associate Samuel Lito with this conservative legal movement is his opinion in the Dobbs case.
This wasn't just a decision of one case.
This was, as you argue, the culmination of this 50-year project.
So could you just talk about that decision and talk about why it's so important to the argument you're making about the sort of trajectory of the conservative legal movement?
Yes.
Well, first of all, you can trace the roots of that decision back to his time in college and law school.
At Princeton, his great mentor was a professor named Walter Murphy, whose specialty was the internal politics of the Supreme Court.
He literally is a man who studied how certain justices on the Supreme Court were able to get their colleagues to coalesce around certain views.
And it was very instructive, I think, for Alito, because it said that being on the Supreme Court isn't just a matter of voting "A" or "Nay."
It's a matter of persuading other people to your side, and that's what happened in Dobbs.
So when you look at the Dobbs decision, the first third of the Dobbs decision is him talking about the great moral divide of abortion and portraying it as a moral issue and things like that.
I think that that was aimed at separating abortion from some things that maybe one of those justices-and keep in mind it was a 5-4 decision because Roberts was not on board with that-maybe one of those conservatives was saying to him, "Look, we don't want to set a precedent that's going to get, like, contraception overturned or interracial marriages overturned or we're going to get the same-sex marriage case overturned."
And Alito was saying, "No, we can make a moralistic case that abortion is unique.
Abortion stands alone as this great divide."
When Roe v. Wade came down, he was a first-year student, and he says, "From day one, Roe v. Wade was an offense to the Constitution.
It was wrong, wrong, wrong right from the start."
And that obviously was aimed at another one of the conservative justices probably who was saying, "Well, you know, I listened to Chief Justice Roberts here, and Chief Justice Roberts says we shouldn't be overturning a 50-year precedent just because we think it's wrong we decide it.
You know, the proper posture is to stand if it's now become sort of ingrained in society and kind of move on.
And Alito was like, no, you know, we can overturn this if it was absolutely wrong from the start, as people would say, maybe Plessy v. Ferguson was wrong from the start.
So that's what the middle part of that decision is.
So when you say it's a culmination, and I say that it's a culmination of a 50-year project, I think that there was a time, particularly right after the Robert Bork defeat in 1987, when there was a fusion between the legal critics of Roe v. Wade and the moral critics of abortion.
You know, the religious right, the pro-life movement.
They cottoned on to the idea that the conservative jurists were skeptical of Roe v. Wade, and they provided a lot of the political impetus that kept Republican presidents like George W. Bush dedicated to appointing these proven conservatives onto the bench.
And to some extent, I mean, we all lived through that period, right?
Proven conservative tended to mean skeptic of Roe v. Wade.
It was never absolutely clear that they were going to be able to overturn Roe v. Wade.
But Alito carried the day.
He wrote the opinion.
It was a landmark opinion.
It shows in my mind first how influential Sam Alito is in our lives and how central he is to our lives right now if you think of how influential that case was.
And you also think of it in terms of all of the history that went behind it.
You know, when he quotes John Hardy Lee in the first couple of paragraphs of that decision, he's remembering himself as a 23-year-old first-year law student, you know, listening to John Hardy Lee make that argument at Yale.
Does the justice have an awareness of the fact that people, that many people now view him as the radical?
The concept now is that many people see Justice Alito as a political actor, as a partisan actor, and not as a sort of an independent jurist, you know, sort of balancing, balancing values, balancing-you understand, being that sort of balancing mechanism that many people feel the Constitution intended.
I think that he's aware of the critique, but he probably dismisses it a little bit too easily.
I think that in his mind, that critique, you know, there have been actual incidents like his wife flying the flags over their house that were pro-Trump flags at a time when he was considering Trump cases and things like that.
I think he analogizes those kinds of critiques to partisan attacks on him.
That, you know, the polarization that has happened in our politics has definitely bled over onto the court.
And he, in many of his public utterances, in many of his opinions, in many of his questions on the court, has shown a sense of that tit-for-tat kind of partisanship.
He had an exchange of opinions with Sonia Sotomayor, literally, when they were delivering opinions just this last term, that was a very kind of, you know, I represent one side, you represent the other side kind of viewpoint.
And I think it's unfortunate.
The other thing is that his clerks are very, very conservative.
You know, he has chosen his clerks from almost entirely people who clerked for Republican appointed circuit judges.
And so they are for him and he's a shy person.
He's not somebody who's out there in the world.
He's not somebody who's interacting with a lot of people who are likely to have different viewpoints.
I think he's sort of scared.
Did your view of Justice Alito change over the course of reporting this book?
It did, and it changed in two separate ways, one positive and one negative.
The positive one was when you go back and you learn about him and his upbringing, and things do make sense.
There was an earnest young man in there somewhere.
There was somebody who was polite and kind of played by the rules as they saw the rules.
Somebody who's loyal to his family, somebody who believes in his own ethnic group and feels their injuries very closely.
After he got on the Supreme Court, after the confirmation hearing, and it was a confirmation hearing at which Alito himself repeatedly emphasized the importance of a judge not having an agenda.
There's a quote on the wall of the George W. Bush Presidential Library from Alito saying, "A judge cannot have an agenda.
The judge's responsibility, and it is a solemn responsibility, is to the rule of law and to coming up with a correct outcome.
That is all a judge should do."
I mean, Alito repeatedly made those kinds of statements during his confirmation process, and then has emerged as a very controversial justice, sometimes expressing anger, sometimes going outside of the courtroom to offer opinions at his Federalist Society speeches, sometimes taking on his colleagues on the bench and others, he's become an actor.
And there's a contradiction there, and we can spin it out in many different ways.
There are legalistic ways to describe it, there are political ways to describe it, but he has become an actor on the American stage.
And he started off by temperament, by personality, and by his own statements as saying he would not do that.
So in that way, my opinion for him has become more critical.
In terms of looking at where he came from and the sincerity of his early years, it became more positive.
- Peter Canellos, thank you so much for talking with me.
- Thank you so much, Michelle.
It was a pleasure.
- And that's it for now.
Thanks so much for watching and goodbye from New York.
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