10 ★ FT Weekend 21 March/22 March 2020Books
F
or many companies, having a
flagship consumer product
that caught fire and a vice-
chairmanin jail would sound a
rather loud death knell.
Not soSamsung. The Korean elec-
tronics group topped itsannus horribilis
by overtakingAppleas the biggest profit
generator in the second quarter of 2017.
It was, as Geoffrey Cain writes inSam-
sung Rising, “part of the genius of Sam-
sung’s business model”.
Over the decades, that genius has
included cronyism, bribery, political
favour and — in a subsequently pulled
slideshow designed to head off activist
investor Elliott Management — a dollop
of anti-Semitism. Questionable as all
that may be as a business model, it
makes for a gripping read.
The story of Samsung, as befits a
$275bn giant with salesapproaching
$200bn last year and 180,000 employ-
ees, is the story of South Korea. Like
Sony, its Japanese rival, which came to
symbolise that nation’s rise from the
ashes of the war, Samsung grew from
humble beginnings to become the blue-
blooded employer of choice for gradu-ates from the country’s elite universi-
ties. It extended its tentacles into a
plethora of industries — from shops to
cars — and gained global renown for its
innovative gadgets.
Then came hubris, and scandal:
exploding phones, bribes of millions of
dollars and aracehorse ifted to theg
equestrian-minded daughter of Choi
Soon-sil, theconfidante of former South
Korean president Park Geun-hye.
Korea has a strong seam of anarchy
running through it, and so it is with
Samsung: here are tycoon felons, wiped
hard drives, wiretapping and an errant
son sequestered in a fishing village.
Geoffrey Cain, a journalist who haswhich it is thus condemned to repeat.
Various Lees are in and out of the courts,
condemned and pardoned, with all the
regularity of Musk tweets. Products are
still rushed to market before they are
ready — witness thebreaking foldable
phones irst launched early last year.f
It also highlights the sheer breadth of
“the Republic of Samsung” — an omni-
presence that stretches beyond South
Korea. Samsung overtook then best-in-
class Sony in the mid 2000s; it took on
Apple — in terms of products and via a
protracted and costly patent war — as
well as Google. One of the many gems in
Samsung Risingis the story of how the
company was behind theOscars selfie
posted by Ellen DeGeneres that was
retweeted so much it crashed Twitter.
More recently, breakout Oscar-win-
nerParasite as backed by Lee Mie-ky-w
ung, granddaughter of thefounder,and
more than a bit player in the book. She
led Samsung’s efforts to buy into
DreamWorks (mirroring Sony’s 1989
Columbia Pictures acquisition); failing,
she took a smaller slice for her own part
of the empire, CJ Group. There is sweet
irony n a movie whose gory finale stemsi
from South Korea’s gaping wealth gap
being bankrolled by a part of the coun-
try’s biggestchaebol(literally, wealth
clan or clique).
Cain knows his material well. A pity,then, that after showcasing his creden-
tials — interviews with 400 people,
recipient of certain leaked documents —
the book almost immediately plunges
into liberal quotes from broadcasters
and print media. The opening lines,
from a flight passenger whose Samsung
Galaxy phone began spewing smoke
during the safety demonstration, was
from TV; his tale segues into takes from
The Verge, Gizmodo and CNN Money.
There are plenty of times when this
works; Samsung has after all attracted
widespread interest. At other times it is
simply puzzling. It does not take an
opinion writer from Bloomberg to
explain that the merger ratio for a linch-
pin deal was an utter horror.
There are also a few too many clumsy
efforts at inserting himself into the story
— a de rigueur requirement for business
books these days. “I befriended locals in
an effort to understand the Korean peo-
ple better” is cringe-making and pat-
ronising; the constant detailing of meet-
ings “over coffee” or “dim sum in a five-
star hotel” starts to become a little bit
formulaic.
Still, these are small quibbles. Like all
good business books,Samsung Rising
ends with many loose ends. The com-
pany is again facing harsh times, with
production nd supply chains snaggeda
bycoronavirus —now claiming ever
more cases in Samsung’s birthplace,
Daegu in south-eastern Korea.
Users have yet to judge on the latest
launch of the foldable phones, and Lee
Jae-yong isawaiting he results of at
retrial that could send him back to
prison. Whether or not it can once again
shake off its adversities and keep rising
remains to be seen.Louise Lucas is a Lex writerSamsung Rising:
Inside the
Secretive
Company
Conquering Tech
by Geoffrey Cain
Ebury £14.99
416 pagesSamsung’s Lee Jae-yong in January 2017, after prosecutors in Seoul questioned him over influence-peddling— BloombergHeroes and felons
The story of Samsung’s rise from humble beginnings to global tech giant
is agripping account of a SouthKorean dynasty, writesLouise Lucas
Running back
to the Rust Belt
Patti Waldmeir n the memoir of a woman who ‘escaped’o
her hometown— then returned to become a steelworkerT
he rise of President
Donald Trump has
fuelled a voracious
international appetite
for the American
blue-collar memoir. Readers want
to know how he ended up in the
White House, and they look to the
art of autobiography for insights
into the electorate that put him
there — and could give him a sec-
ond term in office.
Rust y Eliese Colette Goldbach,b
is the latest in thisgenre: the mem-
oir of modern American industrial
life, written by the insider who got
away — or got away enough to
reflect intelligently on where they
came from. Think JD Vance’sHill-
b i l l y El e g y an d e ve n Ta r a
Westover’sEducated.
Goldbach escaped her home-
town of Cleveland, Ohio at the first
chance she got — only to come run-
ning back to theRust Belt henw
her university degree couldn’t
earn her a living. She then became
what she herself says she “wasn’t
supposed to be”: a steelworker.
“I attended an all-girls Catholic
high school. I ran track. I played
Beth in a school rendition ofLittle
Women, and I was valedictorian of
my graduating class,” she recalls,
noting that adults told her “the
possibilities are endless” — and
they didn’t mean at the steel mill.
She had me at “steelworker”:
my Italian immigrant grandfather
worked at Bethlehem Steel from
the moment he set foot on Ameri-
can soil in the 1920s until he died
in the 1970s. His co-workers could
not pronounce his Italian name
(Amedeo), so they called him
“Jimmy”. He spoke no English, so I
heard no tales of steelworker life
from him. Goldbach tells the sto-
ries that he had no words for.
She does that brilliantly, hon-
ouring the life of honest work lived
by millions of American manual
workers who complain that they
are treated with disdain in today’s
US. Their resentment at the con-
descension of coastal elites is,
more than anything else, what
gave Trump his surprising victory
in 2016. Many remain supporters
— though it is too early to say how
coronaviruscould affect that.
She loves the Rust Belt for its
very rustiness. “When I was a little
girl whose father drove her past
the mill, I only saw the ugli-
ness... I didn’t realise that the
mill was sacred ground. It was a
memorial and a monument. For
some, it had been a deathbed,” she
writes. “The mill was more than
the rust that everyone else saw: it
was a moving piece of history, and
within its borders we were all con-
nected to something larger thanourselves.” These and other narra-
tive gems are strewn throughout
Rust, many of them painful to
behold. This is more than just the
memoir of a college-educated
steelworker, it’s the autobiography
of a woman with bipolar disorder,
who is assaulted sexuallyand who
casts off theconservative political
and social beliefs she was raised
with, leaving her questioning the
family and society that shaped her.
Repeatedly, the churchfails her.
She goes to the Catholic chancellor
of her university to reportshe “got
drunk with these two guys”.
Rather than taking action over the
rape that ensued, he tells her to
“pray to the Virgin Mary. Ask her
to help you learn how to love your-
self as a woman.”
Her narrative of this and an ear-
lier sexual assault, and her strug-
gles with mental illness, are mov-
ingly and candidly told. Some-
times it feels as though they are
strewn haphazardly on to the nar-
rative cloth of the book, rather
than woven into its fabric. As suchRust: One Woman’s Story
of Finding Hope Across
the Divide
by Eliese Colette Goldbach
Flatiron Books $27.99/ Quercus £20
320 pagesVarious Lees are in and out
of the courts, condemned
and pardoned, with theregularity of Musk tweets
I
n seven tumultuous years, from
March 1985 to December 1991,
Mikhail Gorbachev helped to trans-
form Russia into a society freer
than at any time in its 1,000-year
history. He put relations between Mos-
cow and western countries on a more
positive, trusting basis than had existed
since the second world war. Unwittingly,
his reforms also set in motion the proc-
esses that precipitated the demise of the
Soviet Union. All in all, Gorbachev’s
domestic and foreign policy achieve-
ments were momentous, even though
the present condition of his homeland
and of Russian-western relations indi-
cates that they have suffered serious
erosion over the past 30 years.
As in previous episodes of Russian
history, there was a close connection in
Gorbachev’s era between internal
reform and the lowering of internat-
ional tensions. Relaxation of political
conditions within Russia has often gone
hand-in-hand with a better relationship
with Moscow’s neighbours and the west
— and never more so than when Gor-
bachev began to discard communist
dogmas and completely rethink Soviet
foreign policy. Conversely, less political
freedom at home tends to coincide with
more truculent policies abroad, as
under President Vladimir Putin, who
cracked down on domestic unrest in2011-12 and assaulted Ukraine in 2014.
InThe Human Factor, a masterly sur-
vey of the end of the cold war and the
roles played in it by Gorbachev, Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Archie
Brown observes that “it was trans-
formative change in the Soviet Union
that was by far the most crucial develop-
ment... The liberalisation and evolving
democratisation of the Soviet political
system, accompanied by the new free-dom of speech, contributed greatly to
the growth of international trust.”
The US and its allies did need to
respond to these far-reaching changes
in a co-operative spirit. But Brown says
it is highly misleading to attribute the
cold war’s outcome to US military pres-
sure on the Soviets. Even the west’s
increasing economic and technological
superiority was not decisive.Brown can claim to have made a mod-
est personal contribution to the end of
the cold war. He was one of the Soviet
specialists whom Thatcher summoned
to Chequers, the weekend residence of
UK prime ministers, in September 1983
for a seminar on east-west relations.
Like other academics present, Brown
argued that western isolation of Russia
did not promote internal change,
whereas contacts at all levels of the
political system and society tended over
time to bring results. To her credit,
Thatcher — dubbed the “iron lady” by
the Soviet armed forces newspaper in
1976, three years before she was elected
premier — listened to the experts and
embarked on a course of engagement
with the Kremlin. Famously, she met
Gorbachev inDecember 1984, three
months before he became Sovietleader,
and declared: “I like Mr Gorbachev. We
can do business together.”
The Human Factor ffers some fasci-o
nating, and at times amusing, insights
into the way Gorbachev, Reagan and
Thatcher viewed each other. Reagan, a
New Deal Democrat as a young man but
an anti-communist Republican hard-
liner by the 1950s, adored Thatcher —
“the only European leader I know with
balls”. But Thatcher had doubts about
Reagan’s intelligence. After meeting
him in the Oval Office early in his presi-
dency, she turned to Lord Carrington,
her foreign secretary, pointed to her
head and murmured: “Peter, there’s
nothing there.”
Gorbachev would have agreed.
Declassified politburo minutes show
that after the US-Soviet summit at Rey-
kjavik in 1986, he railed to his colleaguesthat Reagan — who refused to give up his
dream of a “Star Wars” space-based
anti-missile defence — had displayed
“extreme primitivism, a caveman cast
of mind and intellectual feebleness”.
Yet there was far more to Reagan than
met the eye. In a March 1983 speech of
astonishing prescience, he described
communism as a “sad, bizarre chapter
in human history whose last pages even
now are being written”.Alongside his
cold warrior instincts existed a strong
idealistic streak and yearning for world
peace. Robert “Bud” McFarlane, one of
his national security advisers, thought
Reagan, a former actor, saw himself as a
Hollywood hero succeeding against the
odds in preventing Armageddon.
Reagan once startled Gorbachev by
remarking that if aliens from another
planet threatened Earth, the US and theMightier than the sword
Tony Barber ona masterly
account of how the cold warwas won by soft power as
much as military mightThe Human
Factor:
Gorbachev,
Reagan and
Thatcher and
the End of
the Cold War
by Archie Brown
Oxford University
Press £25, 512 pagesThere is much to admire inBrown’s
book — but what is especially valuable is
the attention he devotes to the closest
advisers of Reagan and Gorbachev.
Sharp internal disagreements marked
the first term of the Reagan administra-
tion, but then progress on US-Soviet
relations came quickly thanks to people
such as Shultz and Jack Matlock, the
chief Soviet specialist on the National
Security Council.
As for Gorbachev, he surrounded
himself from early on with high-calibre,
trustworthy aides such as Anatoly
Chernyaev, Georgy Shakhnazarov, Edu-
ard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yako-
vlev.Brown correctly notes that Gor-
bachev failed to include serious eco-
nomic reformers in his top team and —
even worse — ended up, in late 1990 and
early 1991, appointing a clutch of die-
hard conservative communists who
launched the August coup against him.
The failure of that putsch triggered the
Soviet Union’s collapse.
The overarching theme ofThe Human
Factor s not that individual leaders arei
the driving force behind historical
change, but that some leaders can make
a big difference. In his final chapter,
Brown makes another excellent point —
namely, that insofar as western coun-
tries won the cold war through efforts of
their own, it was not only because of
their military strength but because they
set good examples of democracy, lib-
erty, law, prosperity and soft power.
This is a lesson that needs relearning for
the 21st century.Tony Barber is the FT’s
Europe commentatorthe tale doesn’t always hang
together as a satisfying whole. Yet
on the most basic level,Rust oesd
what the post-Trump industrial
memoir is supposed to do: provide
an insider’s glimpse into how blue-
collar America lives.
Goldbach celebrates the tough
but tight society within the mill,
and how it builds “camaraderie in
the midst of machines that could
kill you”.
She finds a way to value her co-
workers — who are often openly
sexist, repeatedly underestimat-
ing her intelligence simply
because she is female — for who
they are. She loves what is good in
them and ignores what is not. At
this most divisive moment in
American politics, we could all
learn from her example.Patti Waldmeir is the FT’s North
America correspondentreported for The Economist and the
Wall Street Journal, does his material
proud. Unlike their Silicon Valley coun-
terparts, Asia’s tech champions lack the
type of leaders that are sufficiently well
known to carry a business biography: no
mercurial Steve Jobs or Elon Musk and
certainly no college dropouts such as
Mark Zuckerberg or Elizabeth Holmes
of scandal-ridden Theranos to act as a
storytelling device.
Instead, Cain marshals his material
around episodes and milestones. This
allows for a few cliffhanger chapter end-
ings, while also enabling the characters’
foibles to shine through. The dynastic
Lees, at various times, display all the idi-
osyncratic behaviour of Musk and Jobs:
fromphilosopher-king founder Lee
Byung-chul, who tore his napkins in half
to save money, through to his randsong
Lee Jae-yong, the vice-president of Sam-
sung Electronics who was jailed in 2017
on charges of corruption, though his
five-year sentencewas halved and sus-
pended on appeal six months later.
The format also throws into relief
what is perhaps Samsung’s fatal flaw: an
inability to learn from its mistakes,Mikhail Gorbachev with Margaret Thatcher, London, 1984 —Bryn Colton/Getty ImagesUSSR would surely work together. Lis-
tening to the president, Colin Powell,
another US national security adviser,
used to roll his eyes and say: “Here come
the little green men again.”
Thatcher was an important bridge
between the two superpower leaders —
“an agent of influence in both direct-
ions”, as Sir Percy Cradock, her foreign
policy adviser, mischievously put it.
Gorbachev respected her and had much
in common with her: meticulous atten-
tion to detail, an ability to work long
hours with little sleep and a vigorous
debating style. He knew she had Rea-
gan’s ear and was reinforcing the argu-
ments of wiser heads in Washington,
such as secretary of state George Shultz,
who recognised Gorbachev’s reforms as
a priceless opportunity for dialogue
with Moscow.Alongside Reagan’s cold
warrior instincts existed a
strong idealistic streak andyearning for world peace
MARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/202019/ - 18:42 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD10, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 10, 1