Helene Cooper’s new book “Madame President” takes a detailed look at the life and career of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of Liberia.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

As the story has been told over the years when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was born, a street prophet told her family this child will be great. This child is going to lead. But he didn’t really say it that way. What he really said was in Liberian English, a patois that sounds utterly familiar to an American ear in one minute, incomprehensible in the next. The same could be said of Sirleaf, as it’s told in a new biography by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Helene Cooper. In her rise to the presidency of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has seen, experienced and accomplished things that most of us can only imagine. Helene Cooper’s new book is called “Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey Of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.” Helene Cooper joined us earlier this week in our Washington, D.C., studios. And I started by asking her to tell me what the prophet really said.

HELENE COOPER: What he said was (foreign language spoken). The literal translation is ma is her mother, who he’s talking to. The picken – picken is child. (Foreign language spoken) is what we say in Liberia when we want to say you’re pretty cool (foreign language spoken).

MARTIN: That’s interesting, though, that that was repeated to her throughout her childhood. And yet, you write in some ways her story at the beginning was all too familiar. For example, she was married very young and was physically battered. Can you just talk a little bit about that? And the fact that she was willing to talk about this is in itself remarkable.

COOPER: It is, although getting her to talk about it was like pulling teeth. I will say that she was married at 17 to a 24-year-old, much more mature. He’d gone to Tuskegee and come back to Liberia and spotted her at a party or something. And because at the time her family had a change of fortunes, it didn’t look like she could go to college. And so she went for the next best thing and got married to Doc, who she fell in love with, and then followed him to the United States when she got a college scholarship after having four boys, one after the other, by the age of 21.

She left the boys in Liberia with their parents and followed Doc to Wisconsin where she got a degree at Madison business college. And that’s where the trouble started between the two of them. He was very jealous of her studies, and he started to hit her then. They went back to Liberia, and the abuse continued until he threatened to kill her in front of their 8-year-old son Charles, which is sort of – was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back for her, and she left him. It was a very interesting and not really normal start to her life and her career. She got a job at a very young age as a debt official at the Ministry of Finance, and that just sort of started her on her way.

MARTIN: She started to understand, you know, the economy of the country and what its needs were. How did her activism start?

COOPER: She was working at the Ministry of Finance as a very junior official when she caught the eye of this visiting economist from Harvard, and he was organizing this big economic conference in Liberia. I think it was, like, 1965. And he was really struck by her and asked her to give a speech at his conference. Now, his conference was a big deal. The president was there. All these high-ranking Liberian officials were there. And she struts up to that microphone and announces that the country has been taken over by kleptocrats. And they’re all looking at her like what the – I know you didn’t just stand there – and she completely took apart the government in this first speech to the point that this Harvard professor afterwards came up to her and said it might be a good idea for you to get out of the country. She left and went to Harvard and got her degree.

MARTIN: You know, we don’t have time to talk about all the amazing and horrifying things that she has seen, witnessed and done. But I do want to talk about the fact that I think many people may forget now that she was imprisoned for a year at a time when there was bloodletting going on, you know, all over the country. How did she survive that period when so many of her colleagues did not?

COOPER: She really is a cat when it comes to the number of lives she seems to have. In 1980, there was a military coup in Liberia. At the time, she was minister of finance. There was a military coup in Liberia. Samuel Doe and 28 enlisted soldiers in the army overthrew the government. They killed the president in his mansion, and within a week, they executed the vast majority of his Cabinet on the beach by a firing squad – everybody with the exception of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Now, there are two reasons why I think they spared her. They spared her because she was a woman. Women were to be raped, to be attacked but not to be killed like that in a public way.

And the second reason is because of all those speeches she had been making, complaining – in which she criticized the government. She was viewed by even people opposed to the government as having some street cred. So she was spared, and then Samuel Doe made himself president and invited her to join his government. She did so, but she only lasted a few months before she quit and realized that she couldn’t work for him. Five years later, she’s in Philadelphia. She gives a speech before a group of ex-pat Liberians in Philadelphia in which she calls President Doe an idiot. The next day, she flies to Liberia, and you can imagine what happened immediately (laughter). You know, they trotted her straight over to their mansion and put her under house arrest, and that house arrest quickly turned into real arrest.

She was in jail for almost a year, and that was a seminal period for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf because the first night that she was in that jail cell, there was a 19-year-old Gio girl who was gang raped by soldiers outside the cell. And then they threw the girl into the cell with Ellen. And Ellen is trying to comfort her that entire night, and she talks about this night with great emotion. You know, that, in many ways, for Ellen JohnsonSirleaf was sort of the moment that I think she realized that this is a country that she wanted to lead, to get to the point where this sort of stuff is not done to women. And that kind of fed the fuel of her women’s movement inside of her but also what became a women’s movement, you know, 20 years later.

MARTIN: One of her most remarkable achievements was getting Liberia’s immense debt, international debt, cancelled. How did she do that?

COOPER: She…

MARTIN: And I know that sounds so boring, but it is so important.

COOPER: And it’s so – it actually ended up not being boring because when she became president, Liberia had $4.7 billion in debt. It was apocalyptic. There was no electricity, no running water. The country was literally in tatters. One of the reasons why I say the smartest thing that Liberians collectively ever did was to elect her president is there is no other Liberian who is remotely capable of getting that debt forgiven like she was.

This is a woman who worked for the IMF, for the World Bank, for Citibank. She was a global banking bureaucrat. She worked for the United Nations. She knew how to play one international banking institution against the other. And that was a Herculean task, and she was able to do it in a way that no – certainly the football player who she beat for president in 2005 could never have gotten that done.

MARTIN: On the other hand, she’s been criticized for nepotism, giving her son’s high-level government positions. How does she respond to those criticisms?

COOPER: Well, those are all completely apt and real and true criticisms, and she deserves them. Corruption in Liberia is still endemic. It is a part of life in Liberia. She has not done enough to crackdown on that. She fires officials who are corrupt, but she doesn’t prosecute them. Nepotism – she’s pushed her sons and her defense of that, which I don’t think is much of a defense, is that she trusts them. She’s very good at taking criticism because we now have freedom of speech and freedom of press in Liberia to an extent that we’ve never had before. And you don’t have political dissidents being thrown in jail whenever they complain about the government. So Liberians have taken to this with delight.

MARTIN: What do you want the world to know about her that they perhaps do not know?

COOPER: I think Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is representative of African women everywhere who carry that continent on their backs, the women who are out in the fields while the men are out fighting and at war who are tending the fields and who are making market and who are being attacked all over the place and having the babies of their rapists and going back to the market stalls and tending – the economy of this entire continent I think is carried on the backs of these women. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is a representative of that, and what she stands for, I think, is the realization of these women that they can turn their economic power and their economic drive into political power.

MARTIN: Helene Cooper’s latest book is “Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey Of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.” She’s also the Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner. And she was nice enough to stop by our studios in Washington, D.C. Helene Cooper, thanks so much for speaking with us.

COOPER: Thanks for having me, Michel.

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In 54 pages of a financial disclosure, President Trump’s son-in-law and key White House adviser, Jared Kushner lists assets and debts owned by him and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Pages and pages are devoted to the family’s massive real estate investments.

The couple has emerged as influential advisers in Trump’s White House, unpaid to avoid triggering anti-nepotism rules. Kushner was cleared for the job in January, while Ivanka Trump announced this week that she would assume an official role.

Friday’s financial disclosures show that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law have assets valued at more than $200 million. According to the The New York Times, they “will remain the beneficiaries of a sprawling real estate and investment business still worth as much as $741 million, despite their new government responsibilities.”

The documents show Kushner divested dozens of businesses and investments to avoid conflicts of interest with his public service. He has also resigned from more than 260 posts at various organizations and corporations.

According to the AP, Kushner’s lawyers, “in consultation with the Office of Government Ethics, determined that his real estate assets, many of them in New York City, are unlikely to pose the kinds of conflicts that would trigger a need to divest.”

In the documents, Ivanka Trump also reports a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., with her share valued between $5 million and $25 million. The filing says she made between $1 million and $5 million in profit off this stake in 2016 and part of 2017.

Given Ivanka Trump’s recent decision to become an official White House employee, her financial disclosures and ethics agreements are expected to be filed later. The Times reports that Ivanka Trump will maintain her stake in the Trump hotel in Washington even as she takes on official government duties.

Kushner’s financial disclosure was one of roughly 180 that the White House said it would make available late on Friday as it begins to provide a picture of the wealth of Trump’s appointees. Others include disclosures for Steve Bannon, former Breitbart executive chairman and Trump’s chief strategist at the White House, and Gary Cohn, National Economic Council director who is a former Goldman Sachs president.

Bannon “earned at least $1.4 million in the last year and held assets valued between $10.7 million and $48.6 million when he joined the administration,” according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal.

Cohn, one of the wealthiest members of Trump’s team, reported assets worth at least $254 million and income of at least $48.3 million over 2016 through early 2017, according to Bloomberg.

The disclosed documents provide a snapshot of each appointee’s holdings as they took office. Many of the records showing subsequent divestitures or resignations will be released later this year. The White House says some appointees are still in the process of divesting assets.

Typically, appointees in a new administration hash out their financial agreements and divestitures before assuming public office. However, the Trump administration has announced a number of appointees before these negotiations took place. Data from the Office of Government Ethics has shown that compared with the Obama administration, the Trump White House has been much slower to submit its nominees’ financial arrangements for review by OGE.

As Trump has appointed numerous hyper-wealthy individuals, the White House points out that its ethics lawyers have been working through highly complex financial arrangements. Estimates for the cumulative wealth of the Trump Cabinet by various media organizations have ranged from $6 billion to $14 billion.

The release of the financial disclosure forms is in compliance with a federal ethics law that requires high-ranking executive branch appointees to disclose their financial holdings and reach agreements with ethics officials. These agreements aim to ensure that none of the appointee’s holdings conflict with his or her duties. Often, the agreements require a sale of assets, resignations from posts or recusals from handling particular matters.

The president and vice president, as elected officials, do have to file financial disclosures, but at a later time. The two of them are also exempt from many conflict-of-interest and ethics laws that apply to their staff.

NPR’s Peter Overby and Tamara Keith contributed to this report.

Restaurants are trying “revenue sharing” in an attempt to close the wage gap between tipped and not tipped workers, and to help fix the labor shortage in Boston.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Some big city restaurants can’t find enough kitchen staff. Restaurant owners say that’s because of low wages and a gap in pay between employees who get tips and those that don’t. To bridge that gap and raise wages, some restaurants are experimenting with pay structure. Simone Rios of member station WBUR takes us to a Jewish deli in Cambridge, Mass.

SIMON RIOS, BYLINE: The lunchtime rush is over at Mamaleh’s Delicatessen, but the place is still buzzing. Customers nosh on knishes, pastrami and lox. Then there’s the chopped liver being made by line cooks like Marvin Bonilla.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Twenty-three ribs and…

RIOS: He came here three years ago from Honduras.

MARVIN BONILLA: If you want to have a good food, just try our matzo ball soup. You can get our pastrami and the house lox salmon. You will love it.

RIOS: And Bonilla loves his job, but there’s a but. On average at Mamaleh’s, those who work in the front of the house and earn tips make twice as much as people in the kitchen.

BONILLA: If we get busy or we’re slow, we make the same, but for these people, if they got busy, they make more money. And then you see who, like, really do the hard job. We’re like – the back kitchen is the fire of the restaurant, and we’re, like, making the whole food.

RIOS: Restaurant owners say the wage gap is at the root of a shortage of kitchen workers. To address the problem, Mamaleh’s Deli is one of at least a dozen restaurants in the Boston area to adopt what they call revenue sharing. It varies from restaurant to restaurant, but the mechanics of revenue sharing are simple. Take a percentage of sales and funnel it to kitchen workers. At Keith Harmon’s three Boston restaurants, a 3 percent fee on all sales goes directly to the kitchen.

KEITH HARMON: Now what you’re doing is you’re converting the idea that the busier the restaurant is, the better it is for everyone who’s working in back of house.

RIOS: Harmon says that before revenue sharing, tipped employees earned about two and a half times as much as back of the house staff. Now the gap has been cut by about a third. The reason it’s a fee is because simply raising prices would also increase tips and perpetuate the wage gap. And Harmon wanted a way to close the wage gap without eliminating tipping entirely.

HARMON: We didn’t want to alienate the tipstaff to take care of the non-tipstaff, so we kind of came up with this pennies-on-the-dollar approach.

RIOS: Revenue sharing has already taken off in California. A spokesperson for the California Restaurant Association calls revenue sharing the emerging new norm, but it seems to be confined to a handful of wealthy cities on the East and West Coast. At Mamaleh’s Deli in Cambridge, they’re experimenting with raising prices and dedicating 5 percent of food sales to kitchen staff. Dan Meyers is a regular at the Jewish deli, and he says hard work should pay well.

DAN MEYERS: I’m happy to pay another 20 percent. No, really. I mean, it’s a great thing. And it shows that the people running the place and owning the place – it’s not just lip service. They care about their people.

RIOS: Mamaleh’s Deli also cares about keeping its kitchens staffed. The restaurant is constantly hiring, and they hope revenue sharing will reduce turnover. The only thing line cook Marvin Bonilla’s turning over are the potato latkes. He’s beaming at the idea that his pay will go up as much as three dollars an hour.

BONILLA: We are all happy about that. We invited people that are, like – maybe they were looking for a job, and they would, like, maybe want to get a good place to work. This is one of the best place I ever work in my life.

RIOS: And then there are the fringe benefits – all the matzo balls, chopped liver and latke a line cook could want. For NPR News, I’m Simon Rios in Boston.

(SOUNDBITE OF JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE SONG, “WHAT GOES AROUND… COMES AROUND”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.