Professor Mark Danner’s New Book Is Testimony to a Prolific Career

By Alex Kekauoha (’16)

Few reporters have written as extensively on the intersection of war, foreign affairs and America’s role in the world as Mark Danner. Now, the UC Berkeley journalism and English professor is adding another publication to his reporting catalogue.

In Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War“Ódue out this month”ÓDanner examines how the War on Terror has dragged on for 15 years and reshaped America in the process.

“This book is really an attempt to take a look at what our politics have become in the wake of September 11^th,” says Danner.

Since 2001 the War on Terror has evolved dramatically and without any end in sight. Now the longest armed conflict in America’s history, the war has spawned invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, cost billions of dollars and countless lives. And while Al Qaeda has been “decimated,” according to President Obama, it has since been replaced by jihadist and terror organizations like ISIS.

The use of terrorism against the West, Danner says, is a strategy to keep Americans living in fear. “Living under a shadow long enough you forget the shadow is there,” he says, adding: “The fear is way out of scale with the actual danger.” And our leaders, he says, have manipulated our anxiety for political gain.

War and politics are complicated and messy, but after three decades of reporting, Danner has acquired a keen understanding of how to put them into context. He began his career as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books before joining Harper’s Magazine as a senior editor. In 1986 he joined The New York Times Magazine, where he reported on American politics and foreign affairs. He has covered conflicts in the Middle East, Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, and the former Yugoslavia. His 2004 book Torture and Truth (2004) examined the use of torture by American soldiers against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And his 2009 book, Stripping Bare the Body, tells stories of violent conflicts around the world.

Conflict and foreign affairs have always fascinated Danner, whose first major foreign story took him to Haiti, one of the world’s poorest nations. For Danner, Haiti is “a country that had a mesmerizing history of French colonialism.” Asked why he is so interested in political strife and wars, he says, “only during times of conflict do you see into the depths of a society and see what makes it tick.”

In addition to his substantial coverage of foreign affairs, Danner has also published many writings on U.S. politics. He wrote about the 2000 presidential election’s Florida vote recount in his book The Road to Illegitimacy. And he recently profiled presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for The New York Review of Books.

In the late 1990s Danner was writing long stories on the Balkan wars when the dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism offered him a job.

“I got a call from Orville Schell, who invited me to come out and teach”_ and at first I didn’t take it that seriously,” he says. But a girlfriend convinced him to accept the offer, and he soon realized he loved teaching. “I liked how small the Journalism School was. How small the classes are. The enthusiasm of the students.”

Danner has taught a slew of intellectually rigorous courses that cover dimensions of conflict. One of his English Department seminars, Portraits in Black: Dictator, Autocrat, Caudillo, examined how personalized political power originates and evolves, and how dictators have been depicted in various literary genres. And in the J-School he recently taught Writings on War, which studied the challenges of covering war and examined the work of writers such as Xenophon, Leo Tolstoy and Robert Graves.

“Mark brings to his journalism both literary grace and intellectual breadth,” says current J-School Dean Edward Wasserman, “and in a School that lays primary emphasis on craft, as we must, he offers his students a dimension of scholarly depth that the profession needs and the students relish.”

Despite the tumultuous changes facing the news and media industries, Danner is hopeful for the next generation of reporters and writers that he teaches.

“The effects of digitization and the internet have combined with economic turmoil to cause a kind of cataclysm within journalism,” he says. “But at the same time”_ you have an enormous amount of churning and froth.”

New publications are being started, making it easier to break into journalism and get published.

“If you really are driven to be a journalist, I wouldn’t say this is a bad time. But a time for opportunity.”