James Kirchick & Gary Ginsberg: A Conversation

Gary Ginsberg is a lawyer by training, but he has spent his professional career at the intersection of media, politics, and law. He worked for the Clinton administration, was a senior editor and counsel at the political magazine George, and then spent the next two decades in executive positions in media and technology at News Corporation, Time Warner, and SoftBank. He has published pieces in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and was an on-air political contributor in the early days of MSNBC. In his debut, First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents (Twelve), Ginsberg writes a White House history as told through the stories of the best friends and closest confidants of American presidents. Consider Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed. They shared a bed for four years, during which Speed saved his friend from crippling depression. Two decades later, the friends worked together to save the Union. Relationships such as those of Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley, John Kennedy and David Ormsby-Gore, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, flesh out a provocative exploration of presidential friendships and their impact.

James Kirchick has written about human rights, politics, and culture from around the world. A columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, he is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other publications. For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that someone might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the threat of communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. Utilizing declassified documents, interviews with more than 100 people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Kirchick’s Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt & Co.) is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people impacted everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement.