“Enough” by Cassidy Hutchinson. Simon and Schuster, 2023. 363 pages.

Last Sunday in church, during the “Joys and Concerns” a joy was lifted up for the birth of a baby girl named Cassidy. She will not be the last of the Cassidys named after the poised young women in the white blazer.  Cassidy Hutchinson became a household name when she testified to the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. How that brave young woman got to that witness stand is the story of this compelling memoir.

Since a childhood visit to Washington D.C., Cassidy Hutchinson had wanted to serve in public life. She came from a working-class family and was the first member to go to college. Her parents were divorced, but she tried to hold on to relationships with her supportive mother and her troubled father. As a little girl her father had taught her to be a “warrior” and there remains something strong, even fierce, about her. Her extended family clearly helped to shape her to have a moral compass.

Cassidy had college internships in both the House, with Steve Scalise, and Senate, with Ted Cruz. Her knowledge of the two bodies led to a position with the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, and eventually to be a special assistant to Donald Trump, and to his chief of staff Mark Meadows. She was essentially the “chief of staff” to the Chief of Staff. Anybody who has tried to discredit her testimony by saying she was not in the inner circle is lying. She was an insider and a witness to what went on in the Trump White House. She has the receipts and she is fully and lawfully cooperating in the investigations.

How did a young woman without privilege and connections rise so high, so quickly in Trump World? Cassidy describes herself “amiable” and “a people pleaser.” She is also a very hard and capable worker. I can understand why a calm, efficient highly functioning pleasant young woman would be somebody you would want around in the chaotic Trump White House. And she was loyal, the most important qualification to work there.

After the January 6^th attack on the Capitol, she worried that she would have to testify. Her early testimonies, guided by Trump aligned lawyers, who had told he to say “I don’t remember” or “I can’t recall”, withheld important things she knew. And it bothered her conscience.

She was in a bind. She needed lawyering up and didn’t have the personal or family resources to pay for one. She long sought pro-bono lawyers so she could extract herself from the Trump orbit.

Eventually, she found a firm of Republican lawyers from Atlanta who would represent her without charge. Her story of how that happened and how she came to testify make compelling reading.

She walked into a department store to buy the white blazer and realized that if and when she testified to the truth of what she had witnessed she would forever lose her anonymity, her privacy her personal security and most of her colleagues and friends. I can understand her hesitancy.

She was faced with a stark choice between loyalty to Donald Trump and his administration, or loyalty to her country by telling its citizens what she had heard and seen in the Trump administration’s attempts to overturn a fair and free election.

This was the dilemma. Would she sacrifice everything she had worked so hard to achieve to tell the truth? Would she put country over party?

The rest, as they say. Is history. She was emboldened by reading the story of Alexander Butterfield, the Watergate whistleblower, another White House assistant, who had testified to the existence of the Oval Office tapes that brought down Richard Nixon. Her book ends with her flying to San Diego to meet the 96year-old Butterfield. In recent interviews she says she is still a Republican and admires people like John McCain and Mitt Romney. Would that there were more of her kind in what is left of the GOP.

History will be kind to Cassidy Hutchinson for her profile in courage. This is a story of how one person telling difficult truth can change history. Keep an eye out for all the little Cassidys coming our way. They can wear the name proudly.