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From Exile to Washington Hardcover – 25 Sept. 2014

4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

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In a life that has spanned nearly nine decades and has taken him across the world and back, W. Michael Blumenthal has borne witness to the worlds convulsions and transformations during the twentieth century. Born in Germany between the two world wars, Blumenthal narrowly escaped the Nazi horror, when, in 1939, he and his family fled to Shanghais chaotic Jewish ghetto, where they spent the entirety of the Second World War. From these fraught and humble beginnings, Blumenthal would emerge as a major leader in American business and politics. In the second half of the century, Blumenthal headed two major American corporations Bendix and Burroughs (later Unisys) served as a United States trade ambassador in the State Department and the White House, advising John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and served under Jimmy Carter as the Secretary of the Treasury. After his retirement from business and politics, he began an entirely new chapter in his career, when he conceived and became director of Europes largest Jewish museum the Jewish Museum of Berlin a position he still holds today. An essential autobiography by one of Americas great political figures, From Exile to Washington is an engaging chronicle of the twentieth centurys greatest upheavals, and a tribute to a lifetime of courage, leadership and decisiveness.
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Both an engrossing personal narrative and a thoughtful reflection on leadership --Henry Kissinger

About the Author

W. Michael Blumenthal was the United States Secretary of the Treasury. Born in Germany in 1926, he moved to the United States from Shanghai in 1947. He is currently the director of the Jewish Museum of Berlin, and is the author of The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews. He splits his time between Princeton, New York and Berlin.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (25 Sept. 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0715649159
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0715649152
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.9 x 4.3 x 23.6 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

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  • Bernard
    5.0 out of 5 stars An Extraordinary Life and Useful Lessons
    Reviewed in the United States on 5 March 2014
    Mike Blumenthal’s memoir is a story of an extraordinary life and an especially perceptive account of challenges he contended with in business and foreign policy. He was intimately involved, as a government official, businessman, and private citizen in political and cultural events in Germany, China, and the United States. In his book, he sweeps the reader along a path that runs from standing as a Jewish teenager watching a synagogue go up in flames during the early Nazi madness, through his life as a refugee in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II, to becoming United States Secretary of the Treasury–and thus number five in line for the Presidency in the event of an American governmental catastrophe. Along this path and beyond, he enters into responsible and acutely demanding assignments in government—in the State Department, White House, and the Treasury Department—in the business world, and with domestic and foreign policy organizations.
    Blumenthal, along with his parents and older sister, escapes murderous Nazi Germany to scramble for some years in refugee-packed, Japanese-occupied Shanghai. When World War II is over, he and his disrupted family, sail to the United States. Arriving in California as a twenty-one year old with a curtailed formal but worldly education, he completes high school in San Francisco and then gets into Princeton. No longer blocked by pre-World War II limits on the admission of Jewish students, he completes undergraduate work, gets married, earns a Ph. D. at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, takes a tenure-track teaching position, and starts a family. Already that would qualify for a good memoir. But the much greater part of the story is yet to come.
    As part of a research project, he and his wife and children went to German in the early 1950s. As a rare case of a German Jew returning to Germany in this early post-World War II period, Blumenthal recounts revealing experiences with that devastated country and its damaged population.
    While traveling in Europe, he fortuitously encounters the head of an American company that makes bottle caps. The bottle cap manufacturer had asked Blumenthal just the right question to get him to jump to a new goal: “ Tell me, why would an ambitious young man like you prefer to sit on the university campus and study what others do, rather than testing his mettle by doing it himself?” Despite the disdain of his academic colleagues, Blumenthal entered the business world. Attracted by the business opportunity and his employer, Blumenthal took to the new assignment very well. In four years with Crown Cork, he developed skills that were to do him well later in business and in the US. Government.
    Some of Blumenthal’s career moves—this one and several later-- would seem too chancy to many other emerging careerists. But he sees advantages in each move and gains from them. He says he wants to contribute to the public welfare, thus explaining why he jumps from job to job and why he a Democrat. His first public service job puts him at a relatively responsible position in the State Department to help negotiate international commodity agreements. Although taken to task by his former academic colleagues and advisers for pushing for price, production, and international trade policies at odds with what he should have learned about free markets at the university, he succeeds in bringing about an international coffee agreement. That achievement leads, in turn, to his being chosen as an international trade negotiator in a new office set up under former Republican Secretary of State Christian Herter in the Kennedy White House that is to embark on what is to become the largest multilateral trade negotiation ever.
    While being honored as a rather young and fresh government official to lead the U.S. negotiating team in Geneva, Blumenthal is wisely aware and apprehensive about being assigned to Geneva. He senses that he might be better if he were working out Washington and, under Herter, on the issuing end of instructions rather than being in Geneva and receiving instructions. But he works out frequent trips back to Washington and pays calls on Senators and Congressmen and others to keep his position up to strength.
    Unprecedently large and very complicated technically and politically, the Kennedy Round of negotiation drags on for four years toward mid-1967, when the American President’s (then Lyndon Johnson’s) authority to negotiate runs out. Although it came near collapsing, the trade round was successful. While the negotiation was still beating along a precarious path to its end, Blumenthal accepts an offer in to leave government service and to join Bendix, a big multinational corporation, a major defense contractor and government supplier doing business with the world’s automotive and aerospace industries.
    Serving ten years in New York and Detroit with the company, Blumenthal ends up as its chief executive.
    From his experience at Bendix, Blumenthal formulates many lessons about business management. For someone who came to know him well during one stage of his life, this reviewer is surprised at Blumenthal’s assertion to a newspaper that: “I feel strongly about a person having no say because I had a lot of experience with that sort of thing myself.” Did he mean that it was he who had had no say? But going on to other lessons, he does make other points unequivocally. About the critical managerial task of choosing good people, he acknowledges that he had not always done it well, “More than once I had made the mistake of being overly impressed by the intelligence of a candidate, ignoring the qualities of courage and moral fiber that I knew to be at least as important.”
    Among the myriad activities that Blumenthal found himself engaged in by this stage of government and business assignments was participation in public policy organizations that were studying a then isolated China. Blumenthal visits China, meets with top leaders and humble peasant-types (one revealing a television set in an expectedly backwater province), draws on his amazingly contrasting earlier years as a Jewish refugee in Shanghai. He reports on the three phases of China that he has known directly: that of wartime Shanghai; China under the rule of Mao and his successors; and the China of today. His conclusion: “. . . a realistic view of China today should mix caution with admiration, which many eager foreign businessmen and China enthusiasts, who see only the dazzling developments of recent years, would do well to bear in mind.”
    The presidential campaign that leads to Jimmie Carter’s election as president catches up Blumenthal and leads to insightful, and very personal, analysis. Although not an early supporter of Carter, the two have some mutual attraction, and Carter selects him to be his Secretary of the Treasury. That assignment is extraordinary—after all Blumenthal is not many years from refugee and immigrant status. He feels rewarded by the chance to return to truly public service. But Carter, with traits that Blumenthal admires, also founders on what his Secretary of the Treasury sees as critical faults, as well as problems of bad luck. Carter, Blumenthal believes, gets too involved in mastering minutiae, and he is hobbled in his contest with Reagan over reelection to the Presidency when Iranian students invade and capture the American Embassy in Teheran. Carter loses to Reagan.
    Blumenthal has a good deal to say about what he considers Carter’s shortcomings but conveys the view that he has no animosity for this ill-fated President. Blumenthal claims he was ready to give up his cabinet post by the time Carter brought him in to talk about his likely wind up of his two and a half years of the Treasury assignment. Blumenthal seems to have had an inkling that his service in the cabinet was in jeopardy. Referring to a Carter speech, he recounts that the President “fleetingly referred to a lack of loyalty and discipline in his cabinet, which I had taken as confirmation that changes were in the offing.” But what more does Blumenthal reveal to us? The closest he comes is to report Carter’s remarks about “friction with some of my staff.” But Blumenthal never comes to disclosing precisely who it was or what specifically might have occurred that led to Carter’s decision. Strangely, Blumenthal describes an almost pleasant parting of the ways–although he does indeed characterize it as his “firing” by the President. He says he finally decided to go, but to resign would have been, not only a sign of disloyalty, but would confirm a failure “an act to which I was unaccustomed.” Firing proved in this circumstance the easy way out for Blumenthal.
    He does have much to say about several notable issues of the Carter presidency, among them the Bert Lance affair (a personal financial scandal of his Director of the Office of Management and Budget) and the need to fight a dangerous rise in inflation.
    He also concludes that fundamental change in government is difficult to achieve and exceedingly rare. “[V]oters would do well to remember that, except in rare instances, only incremental and gradual progress on major public policy issues is usually in the cards.”
    So what comes next in this striking progression of career development? Well, Blumenthal is asked to join the Burroughs Corporation. This is another return to the business world and to a new home, in this case it is Detroit, also the site of Bendix. Burroughs was a computer manufacturer and information services company. Long known for its calculating machines, Blumenthal set about reshaping the company to continue producing in a radically transforming technological world.
    Given the enormous changes to the company, including its acquisition of the Sperry Corporation and eventual downsizing and being renamed Unisys, Blumenthal rather condenses his account of what he did in this assignment. He briefly reports that at this stage his personal life changed. In 1979, he and his wife separated.
    Against the background, he reports on goings on in the Middle East. After meeting with the Shah of Iran, Blumenthal wrote a letter to Carter trying to raise an alarm about the need to anticipate a collapse of the Iranian regime. He reports in this memoir the ensuing efforts within the U.S. Government to do something about this degrading situation and concludes, “[H]ad the president better understood this problem, many of the missteps and much of the confusion might have been avoided.”
    In a following account of his meetings with Israeli leaders, Blumenthal reports on the formidable positions of Menachem Begin and Blumenthal’s appreciation of why Carter’s well-intentioned and earnest efforts to help find a solution to Israeli-Palestinian confrontation failed. “If Carter can be faulted for anything, it is that he believed that, face-to-face with a chance for peace, Begin could be persuaded by patient reasoning to compromise his bedrock goals and beliefs.” The president and the Israeli prime minister, Blumenthal declares, “simply talked past each other. They did not speak a common language, and the gulf between them was unbridgeable.”
    The final part of his memoir tells us about Blumenthal being drawn into heading what has become the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The Jewish museum is not a Holocaust museum but rather a presentation of Jewish life in Germany over hundreds of years. Here he reports on his return to his country of birth and assesses the place of Jews in current and historical Germany.
    Throughout his account, Blumenthal does tell us about his family life—that of his forbears, his parents and sister, and his own wives. His father, Ewald, who lived to be almost 101 years old, and his mother separated toward the end of their several years in Shanghai. He divorced his first wife and remarried a few years later. He tells us that he and Eileen, his first wife, just grew apart and that they remain friends, and that she has gone on to achieve success and apparently satisfaction professionally. His second wife, Barbara, is also introduced. There are children by both wives.
    He describes rather fully the greatly strained situation of his family in Shanghai. The key to life was the determination to live through it. In this he gives great credit to the skill and dominance in the family of his mother.
    At one point in their Shanghai life, the Nazis apparently pushed the occupying Japanese to act more hostilely against the Jewish refugees. The Japanese did make a move in this direction, which was very hurtful to those already stressed refugees, but the Nazis did not get any further toward getting their Japanese allies to exterminate the Jews. Blumenthal tries to search for why the Japanese limited their actions against the Jews but has found no answer. Given the post-war exploitation by historians of archives of the Axis powers to reveal their World War II policies, the Shanghai history seems to call for an effort by historians to see what they can exhume about Japanese policies toward the refugees in wartime Shanghai.
    There is more to Blumenthal’s family and his Jewish background than comes out in his memoir. That can be found in another, also intriguing book Blumenthal wrote several years ago, titled “The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews, a Personal Exploration” (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint. 1998). Toward the end of his memoir, Blumenthal tells us that his father stressed to him that he had an especially illustrious background and gave him a family tree. In the “Invisible Wall,“ Blumenthal gives biographic accounts of seven of the ancestors in that tree, which includes founders of salons in Germany. All of them tried to assimilate but generally failed to be accepted into German society. What Blumenthal does not do in his memoir is to tell us of any thoughts he may have had along the way from Kristallnacht observer to U.S. Cabinet officer or American business mogul of whether he had any desires of his own to jettison his Jewishness or to retain it. And, on this matter, what of his wives and children? Certainly, his frankness and directness on other matters of his personal life would suggest he could have told us whether he had confronted the Invisible Wall.
    In the numerous and fascinating ventures he recounts, Blumenthal draws clearly described lessons about business and other organizational management, contributes perceptive and revealing information and analysis of the Carter presidency, and presents provocative observations about his encounters with Chinese and Israeli leaders and his views on quite a few American officials who have helped determine U.S. foreign policy.
    A truly extraordinary life.
  • Barry M. Cohen
    5.0 out of 5 stars What you may have thought but weren't really sure how to prove it.
    Reviewed in the United States on 21 November 2013
    Well written. Excellent story from a leader of American business leader. Interesting look from the inside of big business that most of us will never have access to.
  • Jerry Lindenstraus
    5.0 out of 5 stars life in Shanghai
    Reviewed in the United States on 4 January 2014
    I love the book, because my life story up to the point of arrival to the Unite Sataes is very similar