Jared Kushner’s memoir is only inadvertently revealing

All 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.

I know this because I worked for him in 2011 and 2012, when I was the editor in chief of the New York Observer, a prestigious newspaper Kushner bought in 2006 at the age of 25. At the time, he was ostensibly a Democrat, and Donald Trump was pretending to fire people on national television. Early in the Trump administration I wrote in The Washington Post about my time working for Kushner, who starved the Observer of funding and ran it largely as a vanity project until he folded it soon after his fatherin-law was elected president. In March 2017, Kushner was put in charge of a new White House office tasked with overhauling the federal bureaucracy. I hesitated to write about my previous work with him for fear of seeming unprofessional, but I was deeply concerned that someone with Kushner’s limited experience running a family commercial real estate company — a job he inherited — now had a huge portfolio within the government with real consequences for many people.

The memoir mostly covers Kushner’s time adjacent to Trump, beginning with the end of the presidential campaign and moving through the next four years. It purports to give readers an inside view of what it was like to be a senior White House adviser with unusual access to the president. Kushner, of course, conveniently elides the fact that this unusual access was primarily the inevitable result of his marriage to the president’s daughter. 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. When Kushner met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the men discussed the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Kushner accepted Mohammed’s deflection, and he dispenses with the subject in a single paragraph. “The crown prince took responsibility for the fact that it happened on his watch,” Kushner writes, “though he said he was not personally involved.”