Reviewing Cassidy Hutchinson's Enough

 

Enough by Cassidy Hutchinson

There is a difficulty in writing an autobiography about your own heroism. It is hard to escape the occasional pitfall of self-congratulation. It is also hard to eliminate extraneous mundane detail, like the bagel flavor you like best or your preferred fizzy water. I presume these details are added to emphasize her ordinariness, but it is hard to forget this was someone who managed to be stationed a few paces from the office of the president of the United States.

Hutchinson lists no ghost writer to help her develop a personal style and color and her narrative, while interesting for its closeness to power, tends to be a bit flat especially in the early stages. There is a lot of “and this happened and then that happened.” The prose is clear, but falters in its physical descriptions and her sense of her own motives and of the people around her.    

Although she did indicate that Rudy Guiliani pawed her and Matt Gatz was consistently trying his luck, she does not draw any connections to the toxic male sexual world she was living in and her own experience with an absentee father. She spent a good deal of her early life trying to re-establish real content with this man and at a critical point went to his home, discovered it empty, with no forwarding address. Shortly after that she began her years of trying to ease and organize the lives of two more power hungry and heartless men—Donald Trump and Mark Meadows.

It is not until we get to the story of her subpoenas and her various public and private testimony sessions that the book becomes more compelling. It is not until the end of Chapter Ten that she records her first sense of something rotten in the Trumpian dream world. The president suggests light highlights in her hair would suit her better.  He compliments her after she tries it and she accepts his praise. Shortly after that, she does note that she decided to quietly return “to the dark side.”  I would have loved more comment on the significance of that mention.

A bit further on, her immediate boss, Mark Meadows, asks her if she would take a bullet for the president. She answers jokingly—"only in the leg”. As they continue walking down the hall, she says that she asked Meadows the same question. He replied, “I would do anything to get him re-elected.”  And thereby hangs the crook of the book and all the multiple sycophants who would do anything to stay on the right side of their cultish and never a loser leader.

Her turnaround gains steam when she begins to hear that some of Trump's enablers are starting to fish for pardons. On January 6^th she reports that the president wanted to let armed people into the rally location, then voices a willingness to let his Vice President be hung, and then tries vainly to get the secret service to take him to the riot he created. Finally, after waiting and watching on TV for more than two hours and rejecting appeals to intercede, she labels Trump's appeal for the rioters to go home as half hearted. 

Her final decision is made as she reads Bob Woodward’s book Last of the President’s Men. This was the story of Alexander Butterfield, who exposed the taping system in the White House, that set up the demise of Richard Nixon. Butterfield’s example, she said, gave her the backbone to adjust her earlier testimony and go on to answer all questions fully and truthfully.

There are certainly some choice tidbits in this book, but you can skim through a lot of it. It remains for me a sad story of a very young woman thrust into the cynical center of political power. She is under great stress and is compelled to please. Then, at a major turning point, she does manage to become one of the few in the Trumpian inner circle to find and use a moral compass.    

I give the book a 3 out of 5.