How Safe are We?, by Janet Napolitano

Janet Napolitano served honorably as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013.  In How Safe Are We? Homeland Security Since 9/11, she draws on her experience to cast a vision for the future of security in the U.S.  For all of her experience and the details about her time at DHS, her proposals don't have a lot to add, and her tone of anti-Trump administration criticism detracted from her message.

I do appreciate one of her over-arching messages: the mission and scope of DHS's work is much more expansive and effective than most Americans realize.  She writes "we are made safer through the unseen, uncelebrated work" of all the combined agencies and programs under DHS.  By her reckoning, "the country has effectively ensured that a reprise of a 9/11-style attack cannot happen."  Skeptics will surely object to her certainty on this point and many others, but her descriptions of plots foiled and crises averted make a strong case.

Aside from the undeniable assertion that DHS does great work in keeping the country safer, she can't resist getting some blatant partisan jabs in as she looks to the future of DHS.  These come across as part typical Democrat Trump hatred, and part arrogance that she is great and others are not so much.  Her two big points by which she claims superiority over the "embarrassing" Trump administration are climate change and border policies.

She writes that "many Americans, including elected officials, have infuriatingly turned a blind eye to preparing for the biggest and most irreversible risk of all, climate change."  She leaves no room for disagreement here, no chance that climate scientists and researchers in related fields might have opinions contrary to hers.  She continues: "It's truly horrifying to know that the number of policy makers in this country who deny climate change is not insignificant."  She has no room in her world view to consider that those policy makers may have legitimate reasons for denying climate change, or at least her interpretation of the implications of climate change.

Even worse is her stance on the border.  She, like many Democrats, pulls of the rhetorical trick of condemning Trump's position on the border while essentially agreeing with most of what the president actually says.  She creates a straw man position, stating that Trump "simplistically suggests we simply seal the border with a wall."  Then she goes on to talk about technological and personnel improvements that we can make at the border, points that Trump himself, as well as just about any Democrat or Republican politician, has made.  She writes, "most of the news and nearly all of the mythology is generated by the 2 percent of the human and cargo traffic that is illegal."  Well, duh.  She herself talks about the 350 million people and $44 billion worth of freight that cross legally from Mexico.  Given her 2 percent figure, I, for one, would think that 7 million people and nearly a billion dollars worth of freight would exceed the realm of "mythology" and move closer to the category of "crisis."

Don't get me wrong.  I'm sure Napolitano did a commendable job at DHS.  And I don't necessarily fault someone for tooting her own horn in a memoir of public service like this.  But her criticisms of the Trump administration and her successors at DHS fall flat in light of her partisanship.



Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!