PanThe Washington PostAll memoirs are self-serving — it’s just a matter of degree. But Jared Kushner’s memoir, Breaking History, is, at its core, an extended news release that exists primarily to exculpate its author after his role in one of the most destructive presidential administrations of my lifetime. Any reader who’s inclined to plow through the more than 450 pages of often tedious and repetitive claims will, however, get a very good sense of what Kushner is really like — what he sounds like, how he views his interactions with others and what his values are ... In describing his work for the nation — the many roles he accumulated and then abandoned — he pretends to be imbued with a special understanding of Beltway jargon, where the purview of a particular bureaucrat is referred to as a \'file.\' In Kushner’s telling, everyone wants to keep giving him more files because, like his father-in-law, he is the only person who can swoop in and fix a problem. (My 7-year-old son, a big Marvel fan, recently asked me what a hypothetical worst superhero would look like, and I now have an answer) ... What Kushner’s book really is, however, is a portrait of a man whose moral compass has been demagnetized ... Kushner comes across as an overconfident tyro who condescendingly feeds uninformed advice to professionals with far more wisdom and expertise than he will ever have. The Kushner-as-savior narrative is buttressed throughout with flattering quotes from a handful of colleagues and his father-in-law ... Kushner has an ease with blaming others for problems that he or the White House caused ... The memoir is a burn book of sorts, heavily populated by petty grievances and conflicts that could have easily been avoided with less ego and more maturity ... While insisting he doesn’t need credit, Kushner takes credit for the hard work of others ... If he were a different person, he could have written an insightful memoir, and one that would serve the public. But if he were a different person, his time in the White House would have been very different, too. His relationship with his father is complex and formative, in a way that somewhat mirrors Trump’s relationship with his own father. That alone is material for an honest, fascinating memoir ... a litany of petty fights, a constant takedown of enemies and a cascade of self-aggrandizing prattle.
