[5] In 1973, as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, Shawcross worked in Washington, DC, on the staffs of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative Les Aspin.
Amnesty International and 16 other human rights and community organisations announced they would boycott the review in protest at the appointment of William Shawcross as its chairman as they feared a "whitewash" because of his perceived anti-Muslim political positions.
"[8] The US left continues to praise Shawcross's earlier work; for example, in September 2019, Sideshow was cited at length in an opinion piece in The Intercept defending Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
[24] In a 2010 article for National Review Shawcross described Britain as a "mere piece of the bland but increasingly oppressive Bambiland of the E.U., promoting such PC global issues as gay rights (except in Muslim lands) and man-made climate change."
"[27] In November 2019 he came out in support of Britain's exit from the European Union, on the basis of the EU's problematic nature and approach, writing in The Spectator that "there are risks in proceeding with Brexit.
"[31] Shawcross's first published book was a biography of Alexander Dubček, the leader of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring whose "socialism with a human face" briefly brought freedom into the Soviet Bloc.
Shawcross next wrote "a political study of Hungarian politician János Kádár" who, like Dubcek, "tried to negotiate with Communist dogmas to create more humane regimes.
"[29] In it, Shawcross argued that, following Kádár's 1956 betrayal of Hungarian President Imre Nagy, "Kadar worked to reunite Hungary and succeeded in making it one of the most advanced countries in the Warsaw Pact in both economic and democratic terms.
"[29] In his mostly-favourable review in The Washington Post, Robert Dean, a CIA analyst, wrote that "Shawcross has succeeded admirably in conveying a sense of the atmosphere which has come to prevail in the wake of the reform, and how a cautious reformist ethos and economic success have in turn shaped cultural life, social policies, and the attitudes of youth.
[35] To write it, Shawcross interviewed over 300 people and reviewed thousands of US Government documents, some classified Top Secret, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act.
[45] John Leonard of The New York Times wrote that in addition to being "meticulous[ly]" documented, "it has the sweep and the shadow of a spy novel as it portrays the surreal world of power, severed from morality, paranoid, feeding on itself.
Shawcross's book portrays, in the words of Colin Campbell's New York Times review, "a humanitarian outpouring that was shot through with misrepresentations, incompetence, callousness and shirking of principle.
"[54] The book finds positives and negatives of each player, but overall, the United States, in particular the U.S. Embassy in Thailand and its Ambassador, Morton Abramowitz, "comes out looking pretty good.
The historian and Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, who was "Shawcross's interpreter for several weeks" when he was researching the book, wrote a long critical essay.
[57] The Australian journalist John Pilger—who is criticised in The Quality of Mercy,[58]: 139–141 and the two men have a continuing history of public disagreements[59]—reportedly attacked Shawcross in a New Statesman review as a "born-again cold warrior.
"[60] But Ed Vulliamy, in The Guardian, called it "Shawcross's bravest, most complicated and astute work", commenting that "the little-known Quality of Mercy examined and challenged deficiencies in the international aid programme to Cambodia, which lavished assistance on the remnants of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, perpetuating the violence.
He also considers it "noteworthy that a journalist who in the past attacked American policy so fiercely has, in this book, portrayed at least the United States Embassy in Bangkok as one of the best informed and most decently efficient actors in the refugee drama.
"[56] The Quality of Mercy was republished in 1985 with an additional final chapter, "Report from Ethiopia—May 1985", describing relief effort in response to the Ethiopian famine in light of the Cambodian experience.
[66] A third Middle East expert, Fouad Ajami, criticised Shawcross for telling the Shah's story as a sympathetic (or at least pathetic) tale of "the woes of an ailing, old man, dying of cancer" rather than one of an oppressive dictator and his long, brutal reign.
New York Times reviewer Herbert Mitgang commented there was a "red flag" present: Shawcross had let Murdoch read a draft before publication, violating "an unwritten rule for the most esteemed American biographers.
"[70] Despite the issues raised, Mitgang's review was generally positive, while Sullivan wrote that Shawcross, albeit "unwittingly", "achieved something very valuable", in "expos[ing] the banality of a highly sophisticated and successful businessman", and "plac[ing] the real issue behind the story of Mr. Murdoch's career—the nature of a democratic culture—away from the petty demonization of an entrepreneur and on the larger forces that have determined his fate.
The New Yorker, then edited by Tina Brown, published a short Talk of the Town piece by Francis Wheen, wondering how "could Willie Shawcross, who made his name in the seventies with Sideshow, an indignant expose of Henry Kissinger's destruction of Cambodia, become Murdoch's hagiographer?
"[72] David Cornwell, better known by his nom de plume John le Carré, wrote a responsive letter in defence of Shawcross, calling Wheen's essay "one of the ugliest pieces of partisan journalism that I have witnessed in a long life of writing.
[29][74][75][76] Deliver Us From Evil overviews the work of the United Nations during the 1990s to ameliorate situations in many of the world's trouble spots of that decade, largely as seen through the eyes of Kofi Annan, whom Shawcross accompanied on his travels.
Some meted out limited praise: "highly readable, if at times repetitive and scattershot,"[78] "admirably fair in his judgments,"[77] and "thoughtful but inconclusive" as well as "a useful reality check for all those well-meaning people who clamor for the United Nations to do something.
"[79] At the most negative end of the spectrum, a capsule review in The New Yorker concluded: "Shawcross's reporting here is often secondhand; his prose is dreary; and his thinking (which frequently takes refuge in anti-Americanism) is lazy.
[80][77][78] His identifying Cambodia as a UN success story drew particular quibbles,[79][81] while several found fault with the book's analytical conclusions (or, more precisely, its lack thereof).
[82] Like other Shawcross books, Allies was published under two different subtitles, in a 2003 hardback as "The U.S., Britain, and Europe in the Aftermath of the Iraq War", and in a 2005 paperback as "Why the West Had to Remove Saddam."
"[86] The Economist's review of Justice and the Enemy found the book lacked "original research on al-Qaeda", its Nuremberg comparisons unhelpful, and its author "keener to score points against all those who roundly condemn President George Bush's strategy" than to draw useful conclusions.
[90] Their daughter, Eleanor, is a political advisor, working as director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Rishi Sunak from 2022,[91] and is married to Simon, The Lord Wolfson a Conservative life peer.