A Plague of Memoirs

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, October 06, 2014

The lowest forms of literature are, in descending order: pornography, the staff recommendations at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble, diet/fitness books, celebrity cookbooks, books of poetry written by pop stars, and, at the bottom of this unsavory slag heap, political memoirs, which have all of the narrative sophistication of pornography with none of the enjoyable bits.

The titles are the worst, as though the words “courage,” “American,” “journey,” and the names of various virtues were written down on index cards and pulled out of a hat. Consider John Kerry’s A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America, Mike Huckabee’s Character Makes a Difference: Where I’m From, Where I’ve Been, and What I Believe, Tim Pawlenty’s Courage To Stand: An American Story, Bob Dole’s Overcoming Impotence: A Leading Urologist Tells You Everything You Need to Know. Technically, Dole wrote only the foreword to that book, but it comes up under his name if you do an author search on Amazon, and I have no doubt that it is better reading than Joe Biden’s Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.

I must admit, I have read neither Biden’s memoir nor Dole’s preamble to full erectile function. But I think that the vice president may have a great book in him — not Grant’s memoirs great, but pretty great. I dream of Joe Biden’s writing a postmodern surrealist political manifesto titled Literally Delaware: This Book Has No Subtitle, which I suspect would be colorful reading inasmuch as in his role as under-cretin to the World’s Most Powerful Man™ he has access to the 152-color “Ultimate” Crayola set, though presumably he is allowed to use the included sharpener only under adult supervision. The book would be available only at stores in Amtrak stations and should be read only on the train, a piece of locative literature.

Give Hillary Rodham Clinton — she’s still using the “Rodham” for authorial purposes — a little bit of credit for at least this much: Her dopey books, Living History and Hard Choices, are free from the paragraph-long subtitles that so often accompany political books. (Yes, I know; pot, kettle, all that.) But then she’s also successfully truncated her name — for the purposes of public relations, she’s just “Hillary,” one name, like Sting or Cher. She’s certainly not Mrs. Clinton, which is ironic: All she has ever been in her life is Mrs. Bill Clinton.

Often, these memoirs are pre-campaign books, an attempt to introduce one’s story to the American public on one’s own terms, as in Marco Rubio’s An American Son: A Memoir. Some of them are more policy-oriented, as with the recent books from Rand Paul and Paul Ryan (if they were a ticket, they could do one of those “Wheel of Fortune” before-and-after things: Rand Paul Ryan 2016), and some of them are about settling scores, the classic of that sub-genre being Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life. Dan Quayle, perhaps envisioning a Nixonian, Phoenix-like revival of his political career, boasted in 1994 that he was Standing Firm, though probably not quite as rigidly as Bob Dole.

But usually these books are simply campaign documents or, in the case of Wendy Davis’s Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir, résumés for candidates who have suffered a crushing defeat or expect to suffer a crushing defeat, offering a rationale for keeping themselves in the game.

I have heard more than one thoughtful political observer lament the fact that Bill Clinton is constitutionally incapable of writing an honest book — given the man’s intelligence, his charm, and his genuinely dramatic life’s story, he might very well have written a real work of literature. But politics suffers from the same tendency toward dishonesty that U. S. Grant attributed to war: Political careers “produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.” How many Americans still to this day believe that John Ashcroft draped a statue of Justice because he was scandalized by her bare, aluminum breast, or that he fears that calico cats are emissaries of Satan?

But, as Neil deGrasse Tyson demonstrates, in politics the truth rarely gets in the way of a good story. If ever I run for office — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — I will title my memoir Awesome American Courage: My Courageously Awesome American Story of Awesomely American Courage. Never mind that I’ve never done anything particularly awesome or courageous; Wendy Davis never really had much to forget to be afraid of, either, except, possibly, the voters.