Donald Trump is “so much a creature of the 80s but even in the 80s, everyone made fun of him,” Jonathan Kaufman said. General Electric CEO Jack Welch, “the most prominent business figure in the country, maybe in the world, mocked him. No one took him seriously.
You can just see the way he looks at the world: the glitz, the cheapness, the gold brocade everywhere. All he needs is big hair and leg warmers and listening to, I don’t know, synthetic pop, and he’d be right back in 1985.” Kaufman’s new book, When America Roared, tells the story of “How the 1980s Saved, then Broke, the Country – and Led Us to Today”, a time when Trump has to be taken seriously as he breaks us all over again. A Pulitzer-winning reporter, Kaufman worked in the 80s for the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal.
Now director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and the author of three books on Jewish culture and history, he has written a page-turning account of the decade, its activists and reactionaries, its failures and successes. Jack Welch: that’s an easy call if you’re writing about business.” Welch died in 2020, aged 84. Kaufman shows how at GE he broke the American corporate model, energizing profits but brutalizing workers, his blast-like impact earning him the nickname “Neutron Jack”.
A complex character, his portrait in When America Roared is rigorously journalistic, sympathetic but unsparing. It arrives with the fruits of his labor present for all to see, in figures showing US workers are less rewarded than at any time on record. Also “intrigued by some of the things that were going on that maybe didn’t get as much attention”, Kaufman “was drawn to Karen Nussbaum”, the feminist labor leader and activist, still campaigning at 76, decades after providing the name and “the inspiration for the film 9 to 5, which Dolly Parton wrote the famous song for and which was a huge movie that came out in December 1980.
If you watch it today, it’s still a great film. It’s a comedy with Jane Fonda, but the real story wasn’t known as well, and I wanted to understand that. When I met him, he had just opened this little firm in Chicago, and he had voted for Reagan.
I was working for the Journal, so he was a great source for me. But then over time, when I went back to him, he had become very close to Barack Obama, and his views had changed. We were at a reunion, and people were coming up to him almost as if he was kind of this mythical figure.
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