Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a prominent Democrat who was a top contender to serve as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, offered his most detailed accounting to date of the vice-presidential search process in his new memoir, which was obtained by The New York Times.
In short: He suggests that it was far uglier than is commonly known.
In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government, a question he found deeply offensive.
“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”
Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that questioner was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”
He was pressed on other questions about Israel, he wrote. “I wondered whether these questions were being posed to just me — the only Jewish guy in the running — or if everyone who had not held a federal office was being grilled about Israel in the same way,” wrote Mr. Shapiro, an outspoken critic of what he saw as antisemitism on college campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war.
A representative for Ms. Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“These sessions were completely professional and businesslike,” Mr. Shapiro wrote. “But I just had a knot in my stomach through all of it.”
In her own memoir last year, “107 Days,” Ms. Harris alludes to “the attacks he’d confronted on Gaza and what effect it might have on the enthusiasm we were trying to build,” while also noting Mr. Shapiro’s sharp criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
But she focused on describing “a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.”
Mr. Shapiro, for his part, acknowledged that they saw the role differently.
“If we had door A and door B as options, and she was for door A and I was for door B, I just wanted to make sure that I could make the case for door B, and if I didn’t convince her, then I’d run right through a brick wall to support her decision ” he wrote. “She was crystal clear that that was not what she was looking for.”
Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Mr. Shapiro, said in a statement that the governor “wrote a very personal book about his faith, his family, and the people of Pennsylvania he has learned from and fought for throughout his life in public service. The 2024 election is one small part of his much broader story.”
Mr. Shapiro’s book is set to be released on Jan. 27.
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.
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