Books by insiders about Washington once were discreet, scholarly, and somber. No more. The genre of Washington best-sellers has become an exotic combination of intimate gossip, trade secrets, self-justification, and revelations about the immorality of power.
Serve-and-tell tales have created a booming market for Washington nonfiction leaving New York and Hollywood behind as sources for insider gossip.
Stigma and stain have bested discretion and dignity. The result has been to raise public participation in a, mostly, inconsequential body of knowledge. This has lowered the level of trust and increased the hunger for new sensation.
Only yesterday, it seems, George Marshall and Dean Rusk refused to write their memoirs because they felt the relationship between the president and his secretary of state should be sacrosanct. Dean Acheson, the secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, waited sixteen years to write his memoirs in 1969 for what was then considered a staggering advance - $200,000.
When she was first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy tried to institute a signed, no memoirs pledge from White House staffers, but she was dissuaded from pressing the idea. Her nightmare of insider revelations would become an established genre, and she a part of the establishment, an editor at Doubleday.
Watergate was what whetted the public appetite for the new genre. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not insiders, to be sure, but the next-best thing, great investigative reporters. When they laid bare the workings of power and helped force the resignation of a president, all restraints collapsed. No one questioned the fact of Richard Nixon on his knees praying with Henry Kissinger the night he decided to resign-only the propriety.
In the Reagan administration, the budget director David Stockman was the first to declare an open season on loyalty when he revealed the bankruptcy of supply-side economics in The Triumph of Politics. His advance of $2.3 million, including a $250,000 trust fund for his six-month-old daughter, set a precedent for Washington books.
Today it is a seller’s market for government employees hawking personal intimacies about the president and first lady to the highest bidder. Hot instant history commands astronomical advances – the greater the indiscretion, the higher the advance. Serve and betray has replaced kiss and tell. “Loyalty” is not a word used often in Washington these days. Rather, people love to quote Harry Truman’s apocryphal “If you want a friend in this town, buy a dog.”
Stockman’s impunity stirred the juices of greed and revenge. Michael Deaver’s Behind the Scenes, a defensive pastiche of anecdotes with little focus and a lot of mistakes, exploited the discrepancy between image and substance-a hallmark of the Reagan presidency. As a result, Washington books became obsessed with the mechanics of perception-the staging, the scripting, and the pulling of strings in this puppet show of power.
The avalanche of publications since then all qualify for what Rod MacLeish (a senoir Washington commentator) called “the breaking of the seal on the covenant of conduct and discretion.” The publishing of memoirs while the president is still in office has a debilitating effect on trust and discretion key elements of governing. When the covenant is broken, governance falters. People who write or ghostwrite such books while the president is still in office are either fools of scoundrels. Fools if they don’t understand the system, scoundrels if they do.
Still the quest for the next big disclosure goes on. And there all those new authors that came to town with President Obama…
For me, these books best express the intensity and complexity of how Washington works. The first four are “power books”, written by men who made history.
The others written by journalists and novelists capture the struggle for power and place in Washington, revealing the vanity and weakness of men amid the grandeur of their aspirations. Nobody has written the quintessential Washington novel yet, because in the nation’s capital reality transcends imagination; but, for me, Gore Vidal is the best, he has unlocked the emotions that accompany power.
Henry Kissinger, White House Years, Years of Upheaval and On China.
Harry McPherson, A Political Education
Richard Nixon, Six Crises and RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
Tip O”Neill with William Novak, Man of the House
Tom Ross and David Wise, The Invisible Government
David Haberstam, The Best and the Brightest
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the Presidents Men
Theodore White, The making of the President
Roderick MacLeish, A city on the River
Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
Allan Drury, Advise and Consent
Ward Just, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert and Other Washington Stories
William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary
Gore Vidal, American Chronicle series
1 comment:
Thank you. Really interesting.
Post a Comment