Mark Danner

Mark David Danner (born November 10, 1958) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written books and articles on Haiti, Central America, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East, as well as American politics including President Donald Trump. In 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.[1]

Mark Danner
Danner in the garden of his New York apartment
Born (1958-11-10) November 10, 1958
Utica, New York, US
NationalityUnited States
Alma materHarvard University
OccupationAuthor, journalist, professor
OrganizationUC Berkeley
Bard College
The New Yorker
The New York Review of Books
Websitemarkdanner.com

As of 2018, Danner holds the Class of 1961 Endowed Chair in Journalism and English at UC Berkeley[2] and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College.

Danner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Affairs Council of Northern California, and the Century Association, and is a fellow of the Institute of the Humanities at New York University. In 2008 he was named the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Visiting Critic at the American Academy in Rome, a post he took up again in 2010. Danner has had a longtime association with the Telluride Film Festival, where he introduces films and conducts interviews; in 2013, he was named resident curator there.[3]

Background and education

Danner was born at Utica, New York. He attended Utica Free Academy, a public high school, and then Harvard, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a degree in modern literature and aesthetics in 1981.[4] At Harvard, he studied with Stanley Cavell, Robert Kiely, Stanley Hoffmann, and Frank Kermode, who in 1977-78 was the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer and became Danner's mentor and friend.

Career

Early years

After leaving Harvard, Danner joined the staff of The New York Review of Books, where he worked as an assistant to editor Robert B. Silvers from 1981 to 1984.[5] In 1984, he moved to Harper's Magazine as a senior editor. In 1986, he joined The New York Times Magazine, where he specialized in foreign affairs and politics, writing pieces about nuclear weapons and about the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, among other stories.

The New Yorker and El Mozote

In 1990, Danner joined the staff of The New Yorker shortly after the magazine published his three-part series on Haiti, "A Reporter at Large: Beyond the Mountains".

On December 6, 1993, for only the second time in its history, The New Yorker devoted its entire issue to one article, Danner's piece, "The Truth of El Mozote", an investigation into the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, thought to be one of the worst atrocities in modern Latin American history. The Mozote article became the basis for Danner's first book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, which was published in 1994. The New York Times Book Review recognized The Massacre at El Mozote as one of its "Notable Books of the Year."[6]

The Balkans and The New York Review of Books

During the mid-1990s Danner began reporting on the wars in the Balkans, writing a series of eleven extended articles for The New York Review of Books, which began with Danner's cover piece, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe" (November 20, 1997) and concluded with "Kosovo: The Meaning of Victory", (July 15, 1999).[7]

His 16,000-word essay, "Marooned in the Cold War: America, the Alliance and the Quest for a Vanished World," which appeared in World Policy Journal (Fall 1997) provoked a prolonged exchange of letters and responses from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, and Ambassador George F. Kennan.

Iraq and the War on Terror

Danner began writing about the war on terror soon after September 11, 2001, publishing "The Battlefield in the American Mind" in The New York Times in October of that year. He began speaking out against invading Iraq, notably in a series of debates with Christopher Hitchens, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, David Frum, William Kristol and others.[8] He reported from Iraq for The New York Review of Books in a series of lengthy dispatches including "Iraq: How Not to Win a War" (September 25, 2003), "Delusions in Baghdad" (February 12, 2004), and "The War of the Imagination" (December 21, 2006).

In May 2005 Danner wrote an essay for The New York Review accompanying the first American publication of the so-called "Downing Street Memo", the leaked minutes of a July 2002 meeting of high-level British officials that confirmed that when it came to the debate over whether to go to war in Iraq, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and that the invasion of Iraq was in fact a foregone conclusion. The essay provoked a number of responses and led to two subsequent essays, all of which were collected, along with relevant documents and a preface by The New York Times columnist Frank Rich, in 2006 in The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History.

In October 2016, Brian Lamb sat down with Mark Danner to talk about his latest book, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War, which looks at the 15-year U.S. war on terrorism. The interviewed aired on C-SPAN on Oct. 27, 2016.[9]

Torture and Abu Ghraib

Beginning in the spring of 2004, he wrote a series of essays for The New York Review of Books on the emerging torture scandal that came to be known as Abu Ghraib. In October 2004, he collected these essays and gathered them, together with a series of government documents and reports, into his book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.

In March 2009, Danner published an essay in The New York Review, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites", which revealed the contents of a secret International Committee of the Red Cross report based on testimony from "high-value detainees" in the "War on Terror," who had been captured, held, and interrogated at secret US prisons—the so-called "black sites". Shortly thereafter, he published a second essay, "The Red Cross Report: What it Means" and released the full text of the report on The New York Review website. Weeks later, President Obama ordered released four Justice Department memos in which the Bush administration purported "to legalize torture." Senior Obama officials Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod claimed publicly that the memos' release was prompted by publication of the Red Cross Report.[10]

Mark Danner On Donald Trump

In the spring of 2016, Danner began covering the 2016 general election for The New York Review of Books, profiling then Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump on his campaign trail. In May, The New York Review of Books published "The Magic of Donald Trump,"[11] and on Dec. 22, the magazine published "The Real Trump."[12]

Following the articles, Danner has appeared as a guest on multiple radio shows, including WNUR 89.3FM Chicago's "This is Hell!"[13] and KALW 91.5FM San Francisco's "Your Call",[14] to discuss Trump's presidency. He also has sat down with Bard President Leon Botstein twice to discuss President Donald Trump's first days in office and his approach to foreign and domestic policy.[15][16][17]

In March 2017, The New York Review of Books published Danner's "What Could He Do?," which chronicles Trump's first days in office.[18]

Mark continued his coverage Donald Trump in the 2020 election. In October 2020, "The New York Review of Books" published Danner's "The Con He Rode In On," outlining the fallacies and damage of the Trump Presidency and campaign.[19] After the 2020 election, Danner reported on the Capitol Hill insurrection in his piece "Be Ready to Fight," commenting on his first hand experience at the Capitol.[20]

Other works

Books

In addition to The Massacre at El Mozote (1994), Torture and Truth (2004), and The Secret Way to War (2006), Danner is the author of The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels through the 2000 Florida Recount (2003) and Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (2009). His most recent book is Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War, published in June 2016.

Television and commentary

Danner co-wrote and helped produce two-hour-long television documentaries for ABC News' Peter Jennings Reporting series: "While America Watched: The Bosnian Tragedy" and "House on Fire: America's Haitian Crisis", which both aired in 1994. As commentator, Danner has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, CNN's Prime News, The Situation Room, and Anderson Cooper 360, ABC's World News Now, C-Span's Morning Show, and The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, among others.

Academic career

Since 2000, Danner has been a Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2002 he also accepted a Henry R. Luce professorship in Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, where, in 2006, he was named the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities. As of 2018, he holds the Class of 1961 Endowed Chair in Journalism and English at UC Berkeley. He teaches on foreign affairs, politics, and literature, including seminars on war and revolution, crisis management, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. At Bard he conducts seminars on politics and literature, including on torture, utopia, Faust, the picaresque, drone warfare, and the politics of the War on Terror.[21] In April 2010, Danner delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, entitled "Torture and the Forever War: Living in the State of Exception."[22]

Honors and awards (selected)

Winner
  • 1999 MacArthur Fellow. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
  • 1990 National Magazine Award for Reporting. "A Reporter at Large: Beyond the Mountains," The New Yorker
  • 1993 Overseas Press Award. The Madeline Dane Ross Award for Best International Reporting for "The Truth of El Mozote,"
  • 1994 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Special Media Award for "The Truth of El Mozote,"
  • 1994 Emmy Award for "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy," ABC News Peter Jennings Reporting
  • 1995 DuPont Gold Baton for "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy," Peter Jennings Reporting.
  • 1998 Overseas Press Award. The Ed Cunningham Award for "Yugoslav Wars,” The New York Review of Books.
  • 2004 Overseas Press Award. The Madeline Dane Ross Award for For Torture and Truth
  • 2006 Carey McWilliams Award, American Political Science Association.
  • 2006 Best American Political Writing, For “Taking Stock of the Forever War.”
  • 2007 The Best American Essays, For “Iraq: The War of the Imagination."
  • 2016 – 17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, April 2016.
  • 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, April 2019

Finalist

Personal life

In 2011, while teaching at Al Quds University in Palestine, Danner met Michelle Sipe of Burpee, Minnesota, a Victorian Literature professor. They married in 2014 and have two children, Grace Beth Danner and Truman Leo Danner. The family divide their time between their house in the Berkeley hills of California and the Hudson Valley of New York State.

Published works
Books
  • Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2016. ISBN 978-1-4767-4776-7.
  • The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. New York: Vintage. 1994. ISBN 0-679-75525-X.
  • The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount. New Jersey: Melville House. 2004. ISBN 978-0-9749609-6-8.
  • Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: New York Review Books. 2004. ISBN 978-0-679-41532-9.
  • The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History. New York: New York Review Books. 2006. ISBN 978-1-59017-207-0.
  • Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. New York: Nation Books. 2009. ISBN 978-1-56858-413-3.
Reporting and Essays (selected)
Lectures and Interviews (selected)
Anthologies and Introductions
  • Schmertz, Eric J. et al, eds. (1997). President Reagan and the World. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30115-8.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Towell, Larry (introduction by Mark Danner) (1997). El Salvador: Photographs by Larry Towell. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-03944-7.
  • Buckley, William J. (editor) (2000). Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions. New York: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 0-8028-3889-8.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Danner, Mark; et al. (2003). Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. New York: Blackwell Readers in Anthropology. ISBN 0-631-22348-7.
  • Levi Strauss, David (editor) (2004). Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. ISBN 1-55643-550-9.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Engelhardt, Tom (editor) (2006). Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. New York: Nation Books. ISBN 1-56025-938-8.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Szanto, Andras (editor) (2007). What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 978-1-58648-560-3.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Engelhardt, Tom (editor) (2008). The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire. New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-257-8.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Silvers, Robert B. (editor) (2008). The Consequences to Come: American Power After Bush. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 978-1-59017-298-8.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • de Segur, Phillipe-Paul (introduction by Mark Danner) (2008). Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign. New York: NYRB Classics. ISBN 978-1-59017-282-7.
  • Flippin, Royce (editor) (2006). Best American Political Writing 2006. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 978-1-56025-912-1.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Wallace, David Foster (editor) (2007). Best American Essays 2007. New York: Mariner Books. ISBN 978-0-618-70927-4.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  • Flippin, Royce (editor) (2009). Best American Political Writing 2009. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 978-1-58648-783-6.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)

References
  1. "Fellows List - July 1999 - MacArthur Foundation". September 1, 2006. Archived from the original on September 1, 2006. Retrieved December 16, 2017.
  2. Chuck Harris. "Faculty–UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism". Journalism.berkeley.edu. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  3. Danner, Mark. "Bio". markdanner.com. Retrieved January 14, 2014.
  4. "Into the Inferno, with Notebook". "Writer Mark Danner is at his best when the world is at its worst", Harvard magazine, January–February 2005
  5. "The Most Powerful People in New York - Five Prominent Locals Whose Underlings Have Gone on to Big Things". Nymag.com. September 26, 2010. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  6. "Notable Books of the Year: 1994". "Notable Books of the Year: 1994", The New York Times, December 4, 1994
  7. "Contributor - New York Review of Books". "Contributor - New York Review of Books", The New York Review of Books, December 7, 2018
  8. "The Great Debate" by Gary Kamiya, salon.com, January 30, 2003
  9. "Q&A; Mark Danner - Video - C-SPAN.org". December 28, 2016. Archived from the original on December 28, 2016. Retrieved December 16, 2017.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  10. "Emanuel Addresses Torture Memos Politico.com
  11. "The Magic of Donald Trump | by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  12. "The Real Trump | by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  13. "What happens when Donald Trump's improv act takes the highest stage?". This Is Hell!. July 9, 2016. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  14. "Your Call's Inauguration Special: Barack Obama's press freedom legacy". Kalw.org. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  15. Bard College. "Bard Press Release | Bard President Leon Botstein and Professor and Journalist Mark Danner Discuss President Donald Trump's Foreign and Domestic Policies in Public Dialogue on February 2". Bard.edu. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  16. "Mark Danner". Mark Danner. February 2, 2017. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  17. "Bard College". Totalwebcasting.com. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  18. "What He Could Do | by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  19. "The Con He Rode In On; by Mark Danner; The New York Review of Books". Nybooks.com. Retrieved January 29, 2021.
  20. "'Be Ready to Fight'; by Mark Danner; The New York Review of Book". NYbooks.com \access-date=2021-1-29.
  21. "Mark Danner". Mark Danner. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
  22. "Journalist and academic Mark Danner to deliver Stanford's 2010 Tanner Lectures, with focus on torture". News.stanford.edu. February 19, 2010. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
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