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Name: Coming Up Short
Rating: 4 (32 reviews)
Author: Robert B. Reich

Robert B. Reich

A Memoir of My America

4 (32 ratings)

20 mins

Brief summary

Coming Up Short delves into the profound challenges facing America's youth, examining economic insecurity, educational barriers, and limited job prospects. Reich offers insights into reshaping policies to better support young people's pursuit of stable futures.

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US Politics Social Philosophy Culture Political Figures Memoirs Biographies

Table of Contents

Coming Up Short
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What’s in it for me? The insider’s perspective on US politics

In 1946, within just two months, four babies were born who would all shape American politics: Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Robert Reich. Reich's grandmother told him he'd be President someday. Perhaps she was trying to reassure her grandson that despite his small stature – Reich only ever grew to be 4 foot 11 – he'd accomplish great things.

Reich never became President like those born around him, but he did get a close-up view of all their presidencies. He started his career in the Ford and Carter administrations and served as Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton.

The story of Reich’s career is intertwined with another, bleaker story: the story of how America has failed to live up to its potential. As Reich sees it, the country has slowly but inexorably abandoned its working class. Now, it’s dealing with the fallout of that abandonment: a nation disenfranchised and divided like never before.

In this summary of Reich's memoirs, you'll get his inside view of how America reached its current crisis point and what can be done to fix it.

Robert Reich’s wonderful life

Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" was released in 1946. It tells the story of George Bailey, an everyman banker who helps ordinary folks buy homes. His antagonist is the mercenary industrialist Mr Potter who squeezes every last drop of capital from those unfortunate enough to rent his properties. Today it's a Christmas classic, but back then the FBI actually considered it communist propaganda – apparently the idea that people might come before profit was dangerously radical.

Robert Reich was born the same year “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released, to Ed and Mildred, owners of a women’s clothing store. 1946 was the peak of the Baby Boom – 3.4 million babies were born, the most in US history. For many of these babies, the American Dream was more like a guarantee. This generation would inherit extraordinary economic benefits: the GI Bill which ensured free college education for veterans, strong unions, and an economy where the Great Depression had actually leveled the playing field by wiping out Gilded Age monopolists.

Of course, even then, the American dream had boundaries. Black Americans still faced segregation and structural racism. So did Jews, like the Reichs. When the family moved to South Salem a group of men Mildred thought was a welcoming committee instead bluntly informed her this was a "Christian community" – Jews weren't wanted. The family dug in their heels and stayed.

Robert's formative years unfolded during the McCarthy trials – Senator Joseph McCarthy's paranoid crusade to root out supposed communist infiltrators from American institutions. Anyone who supported workers' rights or economic equality became suspect. The Reichs faced their own economic pressures. Their clothing store, Beverly's, initially served working-class women but struggled financially. To survive, they pivoted to selling "country club casuals" to wealthier suburbanites – abandoning their original customers to ensure their own economic survival.

These experiences crystallized the themes that would define Reich's career. His father's business transformation mirrored America's broader abandonment of working people. He saw echoes of the bullying he endured from schoolmates in the campaign of public persecution McCarthy led against anyone who stood up for the working classes. When Reich went on to enter politics for himself, he saw the Republican policy consistently choosing the interests of America’s Mr Potters over its George Baileys; but Reich’s own upbringing had already resolved him to stand on the side of the everyman.

The New Left: a paradigm shift in US politics

Robert Reich grew up in a left-wing family. But the “Old Left” politics of his parents and grandparents – fighting for jobs, pensions, and workplace security through powerful labor unions – were out of favour with the younger activists he fell in with in high school and college,

The "New Left" student radicals took a completely different approach. These college-educated activists assumed economic prosperity was a given – why fight for material comfort when you already had it? Instead, they focused on civil rights and "participatory democracy." Their defining cause became opposing the Vietnam War, where America was fighting to prevent communist North Vietnam from taking over the South in a conflict that would ultimately claim 58,000 American lives. Reich himself dodged the draft thanks to his height – at 4'11", he was an inch short of the 5-foot minimum, though the disappointed recruiting officer quipped he'd have made an excellent "tunnel rat", fighting in the narrow Viet Cong underground networks.

When politics met business

In 1971, the US Chamber of Commerce asked corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to write a report on the American Left's activities. Powell’s memo concluded that business was ‘under siege’ from labor unions, environmental groups, and consumer advocates: strong words for groups simply trying to ensure corporations served all stakeholders, not just profits. But Powell’s solution was just as forceful. Business needed to fight back by cultivating serious political power.

The memo galvanized corporate America like nothing before. A wave of corporate money poured into politics, creating the now-familiar corporate-political complex – armies of lobbyists and Political Action Committees, or PACs. There were fewer than 300 PACs in 1970; by 1980, over 1,200 existed.

A phone call from the President-elect

In 1992, Robert Reich was teaching economics at Harvard when a staff member interrupted his class – President-elect Bill Clinton was on the phone. Reich had attended Yale Law School with a young Bill Clinton and a young Hillary Rodham. In fact, Reich maintains that he introduced the pair. But since their Yale Law School days, Clinton had carved out a political career as Arkansas governor while Reich had moved out of politics and into academia, publishing influential books on economic theory. That call changed everything: Clinton asked Reich to head up his economic transition team.

Reich's excitement quickly turned to dismay when Clinton’s team discovered the federal budget deficit was far worse than anticipated. Reagan had inherited a modest deficit in 1981 but implemented massive tax cuts for the wealthy, causing it to balloon. Clinton's election platform promised to "put people first," but now deficit reduction would have to come before that – meaning deeper cuts to education, job training, and healthcare, where robust investment had been promised.

The rise of the anxious class

In 1994, Labor Secretary Robert Reich sent Clinton a prescient memo warning he was in danger of losing Congress. The economic plan was working on paper, but ordinary Americans weren't feeling it. The middle class was becoming what Reich called "the anxious class" – caught between stagnant wages and rising costs while watching the gap between top earners and everyone else widen dramatically.

Reich's solutions were straightforward: require companies to share profits with employees, strengthen unions, push the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, and raise the minimum wage. Clinton ignored the memo. That November, Democrats lost control of Congress for the first time in decades.

An end to the American dream?

When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, few took him seriously. A reality TV star and businessman with dubious credentials, a compulsive liar running when the economy seemed to be doing well – why elect this disruptor? Because broad economic indicators don't tell individual stories of struggle. The truth was, anti-establishment rage had been building for years among people who'd lost jobs, savings, and homes in the 2007 recession while seeing their wages stagnate and costs rise. Wall Street got bailed out – they didn't. Their cities and communities were hollowed out, while healthcare and education became luxury items.

Much of the Democratic establishment still refuses to reckon with Trump's rise, instead ascribing his victory in 2016 purely to racism. And to be clear, Trump certainly has exploited America's racial divisions to redirect righteous economic anger toward false scapegoats like immigrants.

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What is Coming Up Short about?

Coming Up Short (2025) shares politician and academic Robert Reich’s insider perspective on working in the Carter and Clinton administrations, and examines whether his generation of politicians and activists succeeded in making America more inclusive and democratic or fell short of those ideals.

Who should read Coming Up Short?

Political activists for a primer on real-world progressive policy
History buffs for an engaging insiders perspective on 20th century US politics
Working class Americans for an explainer on how corporate power undermined their interests

About the Author

Robert Reich is a former U.S. Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton and longtime advocate for economic equality who has served as an advisor to presidents from Carter to Obama while teaching at Harvard and UC Berkeley.

Categories with Coming Up Short

Biography & Memoir Society & Culture Politics

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