151: Could the hostages have come home sooner? With Brett McGurk

Haviv Rettig Gur (0:05)

Hi, everybody. It's my pleasure to introduce Brett McGurk. He served at the highest levels of American national security across four presidential administrations. Most recently, he was Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs to President Biden, where he coordinated policy for the Middle East and North Africa. And very centrally to this conversation, right ahead of October 7, he was charged with heading American efforts to free the hostages during the October 7 war, the war that followed October 7 Brett served earlier as Special Presidential Envoy to Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

He led the global coordinated, led the global coalition against ISIS. Under President Obama, he also led secret talks with Iran to free several American hostages held in Iran's notorious Evan Prison, and received the James Foley Freedom Award for hostage diplomacy. He is currently a global affairs analyst for CNN, a distinguished fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, and at the Atlantic Council. He is most recently, and this is our topic today, the author of Brink, Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages. It is publishing today, October 6th, and is the basis for our discussion.

Before we get into it, I just want to say, I personally, as an Israeli, want to say thank you for the unbelievable work you did. And there's something heart-wrenching about reading this book, because it describes in detail the policy, the fight, but also the personal aspect, the amount of time you spent away from home, the amount of effort you put in to get those hostages out. So I want to say that before we get into it, we'll be asking critical questions of the Biden administration and the American policy. The fundamental thing to know is that gratitude that Israelis have.

Before we get into the conversation, I just want to tell you all this episode is sponsored by a friend of the podcast, Professor Robert Hockett, a Rhodes Scholar, Professor of Law and Finance at Cornell University, who wishes regularly to support this podcast and this community, he writes us, which in his words, demonstrate with astonishing frequency that theology and history in the Middle East do not code easily as Western left or right, and that treating these subjects deeply, not facially, actually makes them more comprehensible, not more obscure or intractable. Thank you so much to Robert Hockett. I'd also love to invite everybody listening to us to join our Patreon, subscribe to our Substack. If you want to ask the questions that guide the topics we talk about, that's where you do it. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com/askhavivanything or havivgur.substack.com. Those links are in the show notes. Brett, thank you so much for being here. How are you?

Brett McGurk (2:53)

Thank you so much, Haviv. It means a lot to be here and I really enjoy the podcasts and I'm grateful for the opportunity to talk about this book.

Haviv Rettig Gur (3:01)

Let's start with, why did you write this book? Or how did you come to write such a detailed history of this very painful, very controversial, very serious topic? There are too many people who have opinions about it without knowing enough about it.

Brett McGurk (3:15)

Yeah, it's worth pausing on that for a second because I did not plan to write this book. I did not necessarily want to write this book.

I was working on a book about experience from 9-11 through the Bush administration, my work with President Bush on Iraq, my time in Iraq, the Obama, ISIS, Trump.

During COVID time, I was at Stanford working on that project. I had an editor and a publisher, and I was making a lot of progress on it. When I went back in the Biden administration, obviously put it all on hold. When I came out of the Biden administration, and my editor, Kevin Dought and the Crown got back in touch with me, I said, hey, look, right now, I don't want to think about what I just went through. I want to let's get that book out. I think there's important lessons in it, historically speaking. Bush Obama Trump. And he said, look, Brett, you have to write three Biden chapters, okay? You can't. You just served four years in the White House with Biden. You have to write three Biden chapters. And so I gritted my teeth and sat down and wound up for about three months of doing nothing but the Biden years and the October 7th crisis, and with the central narrative arc being the hostages. And so that's what became Brink, a book in itself. And I think when I had it down in a very rough form, I realized, I talked to my editor, this is an important book, because this firsthand history of such an important historical event needs to be down, needs to be put down through the eyes of a participant. And I make clear in the opening, I'm not omnipresent, others will write their accounts, but this is a firsthand account, that's how it came to be. And I wrote it in a very raw, very raw personal way, Haviv, about what this was like, because I didn't, at the time coming out of it, since there was no other way to write it. And so that's what, that's what we now have.