With 
unruly 
gray 
hair, 

glasses and a short beard, it’s 
not hard to imagine Peter 
Kornbluh as he was in the Ann 
Arbor of his youth: picketing the 
Iran-Contra deal on the Diag, 
engaging in political debates 
with his Chilean girlfriend 
and her family — and writing, 
always writing.

Since leaving for college out 

east, Kornbluh has accumulated 
an impressive track record: 
he has published a handful of 
books, declassified thousands 
of intelligence files, met Fidel 
Castro and been on “Charlie 
Rose.”

But 
most 
recently, 

Kornbluh has been dealing 
with 
heightened 
fame. 
His 

latest book, “Back Channel 
to Cuba: The Hidden History 
of 
Negotiations 
Between 

Washington and Havana,” has 
proven popular. Along with 
co-author William LeoGrande, 
Kornbluh published the book 
shortly 
before 
President 

Obama announced his historic 
agreement 
with 
Cuba 
in 

December 2014.

“Most of the negotiations 

were quite secret, and that is 
why they never really became 
part of the public discussion 
over Cuba policy,” Kornbluh 
said. “In the end [President 
Obama] understood that the 
Cubans were not going to make 
concessions. So far, his strategy 
is working.”

“Back Channel” soon hit 

bestseller lists due to its relevant 
subject matter and surprising 
clairvoyance. After all, when 
Kornbluh wrote it, its story 
had no resolution — the United 
States and Cuba have been 
negotiating for a normalization 
of relations since Castro took 
power 
in 
1959. 
President 

Obama’s 
announcement 
and 

subsequent visit seemed like the 
fulfillment of a prophecy, the 
culmination of all the hidden 
political efforts Kornbluh and 
LeoGrande had revealed in 
their book.

Kornbluh returned to Ann 

Arbor last week amid this 
flurry of attention to speak to a 
full house at Literati, sign some 
books and go home — back to 
DC, that is. That didn’t keep it 
from turning into a sentimental 
hometown visit anyway.

He may be a Washington 

man now, with Latin America 
on speed dial, but you’d never 
guess it as Kornbluh sipped 
his espresso on the top floor of 
Literati. The only Washington 
outside these doors is the busy 
downtown street, and everyone 
stepping off that street and 
into the store seemed to know 
Kornbluh intimately. Remnants 
of his time here, old neighbors, 
colleagues and friends, come 
in one after another as I sit 
observing.

Friends of his mother — small, 

kind women in their nineties 
— gave Kornbluh bear hugs as 
he marveled that they went up 
that steep flight of stairs just 
to see him. History Prof. Jesse 
Hoffnung-Garskof, interviewer 

for the night, showed up in a 
crisp red guayabera his father 
got in Cuba in the 1970s. Even 
Kornbluh’s former mother-in-
law, the tiny Chilean madre of 
that girlfriend (now ex-wife) 
from all those years ago in Ann 
Arbor, came up to wish him 
well. She greeted him warmly, 
first 
with 
Spanish 
terms 

of endearment and then in 
affectionate, accented English.

“Oh, 
hello, 
Professor 

Langland, 
how 
are 
you?” 

Everyone got their espresso, 
cheerfully ignoring the setting 
sun outside the window, and 
took their seats. These were 
Latin Americans, after all — the 
coffee flows like water.

Kornbluh has plenty of tales 

to tell, and he’s happy to share 
them if only you ask. Now and 
then, the stories jumped out 
of casual conversation already 
clothed in technicolor and three 
dimensions: Henry Kissinger 
slams 
his 
office 
door 
and 

grumbles, “That pipsqueak!” 
at Fidel, the insolent punk 
leering at him across the Straits 
of 
Florida. 
Gabriel 
Garcia 

Márquez sits at a long wooden 
table in Cape Cod, the famous 
novelist acting as undercover 
link between Washington and 
Cuba. A bull-headed Cuban 
exile 
flies 
his 
two-engine 

into Cuban airspace, drifting 
closer and closer to Havana 
and sparking an international 
incident.

“I just hope the color of [these 

events] is transmitted through 
the book,” Kornbluh said.

(It is.)
At the core of his work, 

though, is not swashbuckling 
adventure 
but 
meticulous 

research, 
compellingly 
told. 

Kornbluh does more than just 
declassify, read and report. He 
has sifted through stacks, piles, 
libraries full of documents, 
somehow crafting a cohesive 
narrative out of the fragmented, 
often 
contradictory 
mosaic 

of U.S. intelligence efforts in 

Latin America. He sussed this 
information 
out 
of 
willing 

subjects, many of them former 
intelligence 
officers 
and 

government officials frustrated 
with the way things went all 
those years ago.

“The best source is the one 

with the grievance,” he said. 
He calls his technique “critical 
oral 
history” 
— 
declassify 

the documents, take them to 
the person who wrote them, 
received them or carried out 
their orders and ask them why 
they did what they did. “It’s an 
amazing feeling to meet these 
people,” he said.

He’s been doing this since 

college, when an article in 
“Penthouse” (he says he only 
read it for the articles) led 
him to the former Ambassador 
to 
Chile 
under 
the 
Nixon 

Administration. Weeks later, he 
was sitting in the man’s living 
room, listening to him read 
sheaths of top secret documents 
into Kornbluh’s tape recorder. 
The tape ran out after an hour, 
but let’s call it a victory.

The 
key 
to 
his 
major 

professional 
findings 
on 

Chile 
and 
Cuba 
is 
the 

National Security Archive, an 
organization with an ominous-
sounding name that’s actually 
a benign, inquisitive nonprofit.

“It’s an organization that 

tries to use history to make 
history. The goal is to release 
documents that can enhance 
our knowledge of history and 
provide 
closure,” 
Kornbluh 

said. 
“The 
declassified 

documents allow one to be a 
fly on the wall as U.S. officials 
from Kennedy to Kissinger to 
Oliver North discuss using U.S. 
aggression and influence, overt 
and covert, to assert control 
over the region.”

As Havana real estate prices 

rise and Americans clamor for 
Jet Blue tickets direct to Cuba, 
no one is quite sure what comes 
next. What’s certain, though, is 
that Kornbluh will be returning 
to the island, and so will his 
book.

“I spent considerable time 

arranging for the book to 
be printed also in Cuba,” he 
explained, “for a price that 
Cubans can afford.”

The Cuban edition comes 

out in December, while the 
snows batter Ann Arbor and 
Washington, and the sun beats 
down in Havana.

ARTIST
PROFILE

IN

PETER KORNBLUH

UM alum Peter Kornbluh wrote a bestselling book on Cuba-US relations.

MERIN MCDIVITT

Daily Arts Writer

 Last week, Radiohead 
debuted their third video 
from A Moon Shaped Pool, this 
time for the song “Present 
Tense.” A sparse production, 
it features members Thom 
Yorke and Jonny Greenwood 
accompanied by a Roland 
CR-78, with Paul Thomas 
Anderson behind the camera 
as director. Yorke and crew 
previously worked with 
Anderson on “Daydreaming,” 
AMSP’s second video, which 
premiered back in August.
 But “Present Tense” is barely 
a music video. And Anderson’s 
presence is barely felt, with 

only hints of 
his creative 
hand 
appearing as 
the camera 
cuts between 
close ups of 
Yorke’s face 
and wider 
shots of 
Greenwood 
and Yorke 
performing 
together. 
Otherwise, 
the video serves more as a 
live performance. It’s dimly 
lit and intimate, as if you 
were watching it at the Blind 
Pig, rather than on YouTube. 
And if I’m being honest, this 
is the first Radiohead music 
video I’ve ever seen. I’d 
never really felt the need to 

give their music any visual 
representation; it’s already so 
hauntingly satisfying when it 
stands alone. But I have seen 
the band live, and this video 
feels a lot like that — except, 
lucky for you, it’s not as 
crowded.
 - RACHEL KERR

MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW

A-

“Present Tense”

Radiohead

XL RECORDINGS

Most recently, 
Kornbluh has 

been dealing with 
heightened fame.

For a few cold days in early 

1960, a group of documentari-
ans led by Robert Drew followed 
two presidential candidates as 
they campaigned against each 
other in the Wisconsin demo-
cratic primary. One candidate 
connected with the low-income 
white rural voter, one with the 
more diverse, upper-income cit-
ies. One candidate was a natural 
with large crowds; one worked 
better in intimate conversations 
with voters. One candidate had 
detailed policy proposals, one 
relied on sweeping rhetoric.

Sound familiar? This wasn’t 

Clinton and Trump or Clin-
ton and Sanders. It was John F. 
Kennedy of Massachusetts and 
Hubert Humphrey of Minne-
sota. The showdown between 
the two senators, captured in 
Robert Drew’s 1960 documen-
tary, “Primary,” is as civil as 
this election is uncivil, yet the 
demographic and representative 
divisions remain unchanged. 
As Election Day draws nearer, 
Humphrey continues to speak to 
people in their homes and on the 
street, while Kennedy attracts 
large crowds for speeches in cit-
ies. Humphrey rails against the 
newspapers and magazines that 
“laugh at the farmers.” Kennedy 
remains silent about his Catho-
lic faith until he appears in 
heavily Polish Catholic Milwau-
kee. Both fidget ever so slightly 
when they speak.

33 years later, another rising 

Democratic star received the 
documentary treatment, but the 
form and focus was completely 
different. “The War Room” fol-
lowed Bill Clinton’s campaign 
from the primaries to the gen-
eral election. Clinton, who was 
plagued by scandal even during 
the primaries, was an icon for 
a new generation in American 
politics. He and Al Gore, his 
Tennessean running mate, were 
both Southern Democrats who 
had tapped into the economic 
anxieties of their surroundings. 
“New Democrats” found a hero 

in the Arkansan Clinton. Mean-
while, to Clinton and his sup-
porters, George H.W. Bush, the 
sitting president, was a wealthy 
old fogey who had feigned soli-
darity for the working class on 
the campaign trail by promising 
to never raise taxes, only to do so 
once in office.

The story of “The War Room” 

isn’t about Clinton and Bush, 
though. It’s about Clinton’s two 
chief operatives who have since 
become major stars in the politi-
cal world. James “The Ragin’ 
Cajun” Carville, Clinton’s cam-
paign manager, is a rambunc-
tious visionary whose skills 
are matched in strength only 
by his Bayou accent. George 
Stephanopoulos, whose fame 
has grown since he began host-
ing ABC News’s Sunday show, 
was Clinton’s young and prep-
py communications director. 
Carville and Stephanopoulos, 
at first glance, are more suit-
able for a buddy comedy than 
a national campaign, but their 
adept political skills become 
apparent quickly.

Political media has trans-

formed, thanks to cable televi-
sion and, recently, the Internet, 
from basic reports of candidate 
positions in 1960 to fully-fledged 
war-zone 
correspondence 
in 

1992 to the present. One of the 
casualties of the 24/7 news cycle 
is brilliantly displayed by the 
entirety of Pennebaker’s docu-
mentary. While “Primary” fol-
lows two candidates, “The War 
Room” follows two campaign 
operatives. Bill Clinton barely 
appears in person; he’s often 
reserved to the small televi-
sion screen in the corner of the 
campaign office. But that’s pre-
cisely the point: in the postmod-
ern political era, candidates for 
elected office are merely pixels 
on a screen — television, com-
puter, phone or otherwise. Can-
didates are defined not by what 
is truly newsworthy (namely, 
their policy positions), but rath-
er on what brings in the most 
traffic (namely, their scandals, 
one of which, Jennifer Flowers, 
appears in “The War Room”). 
And rarely do those two overlap.

It’s appropriate, then, that 

there’s a narrator in “Primary” 
who enters the conversation 
periodically, 
detailing 
what 

each candidate is doing, what 
their strengths are and what’s 
on the agenda next. Akin to a 
reliable 1960 news media, raw 
material is contextualized and 
synthesized for the average 
viewer, though the audience for 
“Primary” was likely limited 
to those who closely followed 
politics. No documentary is 
entirely objective, but “Prima-
ry” is pretty close. There is no 
narrator in “The War Room” — 
with constant access to politics, 
we no longer need a distiller of 
information — but all informa-
tion comes from one side of 
the debate. Jennifer Flowers is 
something to be downplayed. 
“No New Taxes” is something to 
be given attention. 

There’s another story to be 

told: both films are equally 
about political messaging, but 
each clearly belongs to its own 
generation of the practice. Ken-
nedy and Humphrey have dif-
ferent messages and express 
them 
differently 
but 
each 

appears genuine. To the skep-
tical viewer, meanwhile, Bill 
Clinton, still pixelated on the 
corner television, is rendered a 
vessel for his operatives’ strat-
egies. The opponent, the estab-
lishment incumbent Bush, must 
have been equally, if not more, 
shaped by hired consultants 
than personal convictions.

“The War Room” asks and 

answers the question: has new 
political media helped us? Prob-
ably not. We still know pre-
cious little about candidates’ 
policy positions or about the 
issues over which they dis-
agree. Instead, endless ink is 
spilled on the horse race, the 
peripheral consultant class that 
shapes each candidate (though, 
arguably, that is becoming just 
as valuable) and the tangential 
scandals that reflect little to 
nothing about governing abil-
ity. To paraphrase one current 
presidential candidate, it’s time 
to make political media great 
again.

DANIEL HENSEL

Daily Arts Writer

Old docs show new campaign tricks

‘The War Room’ and ‘Primary’ show how political media operates

I am twelve years old, and my 

mother, grandmother and I are 
traveling to the northern part of 
Iran. From my grandmother’s 
home in Tehran, we road trip for 
almost eight hours via one giant 
bus filled with people from all 
around the city. In early morning 
darkness and almost complete 
silence, we board the bus. The 
engine rumbles to life, and we 
depart. For the first 20 minutes, 
while the deep indigo of the sky 
slowly filters to grey, to orange, 
to sunrise, the inhabitants of the 
bus keep mostly to themselves. 
I am more than ready to spend 
this trip how I would normally 
spend an American bus ride to 
school: in complete, reserved 
silence. Our bus driver, however, 
has different plans. 

As soon as the first rays of 

sunlight reach through the fin-
gerprint-smudged glass of the 
windows, he decides he is tired 
of the inhibitions of his passen-
gers and flicks on the radio. Out 
blares loud Persian music, more 
appropriate for a late-night club 
scene than a dirty bus at 7 in the 
morning. I am sleep deprived, 
deeply confused and, most of 
all, desperately trying to keep 
out of the spotlight. So instead 
of trying to take apart the deep 
complexities of this strange situ-
ation, I burrow my head onto my 
grandmother’s shoulder, close 
my eyes and try to nap away the 
remainder of the trip.

When I awake groggily a few 

hours later, I seem to be in an 
entirely different world. What 
had been a relatively discreet bus 
when I had fallen asleep (despite 

the ostentatious music) is now 
a full-fledged dance party: peo-
ple dancing in the aisle, people 
dancing on top of the bus seats, 
their hands and arms and heads 
hanging out of the window 
while cheers, whoops and hol-
lers collide in the air. In the time 
I blissfully slept, strangers have 
become friends, sharing ther-
moses of tea and biscuits. In the 
time I blissfully slept, strang-
ers had become dance partners, 
shimmying up and down the 
narrow aisle to the encourage-
ment of the other passengers. 
Old, young, man, woman, it 
didn’t matter — if you were on 
that bus, you were aggressively 
pulled into the chaos. By the 
time the bus pulled into its des-
tination many hours later, I had 
learned two things. One: there 
is hardly anything more valued 
and preserved in Persian cul-
ture than music. It is such an 
essential aspect to the Persian 
identity that it often feels like 
the unifying bond that ties the 
entire culture together.

Two: there really ain’t no 

party like a Persian party.

In fact, my earliest memory of 

the Persian culture that my par-
ents tried to preserve even when 
they immigrated to the United 
States was music. I vaguely 
remember my mother picking 
me up and twirling me around 
our small kitchen to the viva-
cious beat of different Persian 
songs while my father cheered 
from the sidelines. Whenever 
we would visit family in Iran, 
house parties would never fail to 
pop up almost every day of the 
week, all set to a soundtrack that 
was both modern and inherently 
Persian.

In part, the reason why music 

holds such an importance in 
Persian culture is because lan-
guage holds such precedence 
in identity. From famous poets 
like Rumi to famous singers 
like Googoosh, all Iranian art-
ists handle their words like the 
language is an art itself. Tra-
ditional Persian songs are, in 
essence, poems layered over a 
simple instrumental tune; their 
purpose is not to entertain, but 
to tell a story. Even more modern 
dance jams still take inspiration 
from the iconic old songs, remix-
ing conventional melodies and 
adding more appropriate heavy 
club beats. But as Persian music 
grows and evolves, it never seems 
to lose sight of its origins, and 
neither have the Persian people.

When I was little, Persian 

music was all that I listened to, 
mostly because it was all my par-
ents would play in the house. But 
it was also because I felt a certain 
connection to the songs, even 
back then, when I didn’t know yet 
of the importance of music in my 
culture. Even now that my music 
taste has expanded and varied 
quite a bit, whenever I go back 
to the Persian classics I remem-
ber my parents playing, I gain a 
certain sense of sweet nostalgia. 
It makes me feel connected to 
an identity that I sometimes feel 
very disconnected from. No mat-
ter what is happening in my life 
here, I listen to this music and I 
remember there is a country, a 
city, a place where the people, my 
people, are as vibrant and beauti-
ful as the songs I hear through 
my headphones. I remember 
this and never fail to feel a little 
less alone.

SHIMA SADAGHIYANI

Daily Arts Writer

Ain’t no party like a Persian party

How a trip to Tehran changed opinions on Iranian culture and music

REEL POLITICS

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

4B — Thursday, September 22, 2016
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

