‘Enough’
By Cassidy Hutchinson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023). 362 pages.
Reviewed by William Powell Tuck
Enough is more than a memoir about her life’s journey, but a revelation about the radical challenge Cassidy Hutchinson faced while serving as a special assistant to President Donald Trump and his then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
She recounts that after a childhood visit to Washington, D.C., she had an aspiration to find some way to serve her country. She grew up in a working-class family in Pennington, New Jersey, and was the only one in her family to graduate from college. Although it had not been her first choice, she graduated from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Even in high school, she had felt a gravitational pull toward politics and the Republican Party. College became for her a means to reach her goal of somehow going into politics.
In her junior year in college, she applied for an internship in Congress with the Republican party and received an offer to serve as a summer intern with Rep. Dennis Scalise of Louisiana and later with Ted Cruz. This experience confirmed her desire to find a way to serve in the government. After graduating from college, she began her full-time governmental work with Ben Howard, director of the Office of Legislative Affairs (OLA) House team.
She worked in several other capacities until Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to the president, asked her to work as his special assistant. Her desk was only a few steps from the president’s office where she was able to be privy to much that happened in that area. The book recounts how well she performed her duties and the strong affirmation she received from all the senators, congressional representatives, staffers, and even the president himself. She was a strong supporter of President Trump until January 6, 2021, when, at the age of 24, she had to make a decision to be loyal to President Trump and his administration or to be loyal to the country and our Constitution.
She faced a difficult decision when she was asked to appear before the January 6 House Committee. In her first appearance, a Trump lawyer instructed her to answer, when she could with, “I don’t recall.” Following this interview with the committee, she was troubled, and began to struggle with her desire to be fully truthful. After some conversation with Liz Cheney, she was subpoenaed to appear before the committee again. She had been inspired by reading the book about Alex Butterfield’s experience during the Nixon trial and his quest to be truthful even at personal political cost. Even her father had discouraged her appearing before the committee again. She wanted to do it, but struggled with what to do until she found some lawyers who would work for her “pro bono” since she had no funds to pay an attorney.
She recounts her struggles with those who wanted her to convey the party line and with her personal pressure to defend American democracy. She describes her preparation for her second appearance before the committee and her revelations about the lies that many had told about the efforts to overthrow an election and their involvement in the January 6 riot. “Her bravery and patriotism,” Liz Cheney observed, “were awesome to behold.”
After her second appearance before the committee, she recounts how Mark Meadows and others disowned her and her need to have protection for her life and her own personal financial struggles. But her desire to be truthful would now allow her, she said, “to look at herself in the mirror.”
The book is a gripping account of how a young woman faced the most difficult decision of her life with many pushing her to not be honest, yet having the courage, after much inner conflict, to make the right, courageous decision.
The book not only recounts one person’s personal struggle, but summons the reader to examine his or her own struggle to face one’s political dilemma about our democracy today.
— William Powell Tuck is a Baptist Minister at Large living in Richmond, Virginia.
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