Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
When future U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich faced being drafted into the Vietnam War in 1968, an Army recruiter tried desperately to add one inch to his height. The recruiter wanted Reich to become a “tunnel rat,” one of the small-statured, specialized infantrymen who could sneak into Viet Cong underground hideouts and kill their inhabitants.
Five feet was the mandated minimum height for American soldiers, and no matter how many times Reich was told to “stand up straight,” he measured four feet eleven inches. He was declared 4-F and later found to have inherited a rare mutation called Fairbank’s disease, or multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, which slows bone growth.
“Coming Up Short,” Reich’s enlightening and politically rousing new memoir, shows that failing to qualify for the draft was about the only time in his life that stature—the shortage of it—gave him any advantage.
Long before he served in the Ford and Carter administrations, became Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, and joined Barack Obama’s economic transition advisory board, “Bobby” Reich endured frequent bullying as a child. He was noticeably small for his age and needed larger children to protect him until he finally learned how to fight back.
Ironically, his first walk-to-school protector was a young teen, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, whose “calm good nature” kept bullies at bay. Reich eventually lost touch with Schwerner. But in 1964, he was stunned to learn Schwerner had gone to Mississippi to help register Black voters and had been shot and killed in a Ku Klux Klan ambush. Two other “Freedom Summer” volunteers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, also died. Fighting bullyism became one of Reich’s personal causes.
Reich describes “Coming Up Short,” his 19th book, as “part autobiography, part history focused on why America elected Donald Trump in 2016 and then again in 2024, and part a story of the failure of my generation” to curb racial, political, and income inequality. He also offers sharp criticisms of the current Supreme Court’s conservative jurists and Trump’s blatantly bullying tactics in national and international affairs.
“Today’s Supreme Court majority doesn’t have a clue about the court’s moral authority and apparently couldn’t care less,” he charges. “The Republican appointees to the court are mostly political hacks, rigid ideologues, and small minds intent on entrenching the power of the already powerful, comforting the already comfortable, and inflicting pain on the already afflicted.”
As for the current president: “When Trump first ran as a candidate for president in 2015, I viewed him as an anomaly, a cartoon caricature of a con man trying to gain power. He spent most of his life bullying others—employees, contractors, vendors, women, tenants, lawyers, bankers, politicians, producers. He was and is a bully’s bully—vulgar, chaotic, angry, uninformed, impulsive, vindictive.”
Other matters get interesting focus as well, including (1) his energetic teaching style as a long-time (and now retired) college professor and (2) America’s tendency to elect tall leaders. “My dear friend and mentor, the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was six foot eight,” Reich notes. “He once said that favoring the tall was ‘one of the most blatant and forgiven prejudices in our society.’ When we walked around together, chatting away, people stared at us as if we were a carnival act. We laughed it off.”
Reich, however, does not laugh off how shortness affected his effort to win the 2002 Democratic nomination for Massachusetts governor. “[I]t seemed that the only attribute reporters wanted to cover was my height. Regardless of what I said in my speeches, the Boston Globe ran photos of me standing on boxes so I could see over the podium. The right-wing Boston Herald ran a headline on its front page, charging ‘Short People Are Furious with Reich,’ because I had joked about my height on the campaign trail. None of it helped me with that election. But I didn’t lose because of my height. I lost because I was a lousy campaigner.”
Now nearing 80, Reich naturally has lost a little more height. Yet he isn’t letting himself be overlooked. In print and video, on Substack, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, he has become one of the leading voices, along with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others, rallying voters and speaking out against Trump. Also, “The Last Class,” a movie featuring Reich lecturing on wealth and poverty to a thousand college students, is now showing in movie theaters.
While the Democratic Party keeps waiting for charismatic candidates who can take charge in 2026 and 2028, Reich insists individual voters must begin taking actions now. As he said in a recent YouTube “Coffee Klatch” episode: “We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.”
“Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America” by Robert B. Reich, Knopf, 416 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats.
Si Dunn is a freelance writer in Franklin, Mass. He worked for newspapers in Texas and Arkansas and currently reviews books for Lone Star Literary Life. Email sidunn@sagecreekproductions.com
