Peter Osnos: What Presidents Really Think
[Peter Osnos is a journalist turned book editor/publisher. He spent 18 years working at various bureaus for The Washington Post before founding Public Affairs Books.]
The modern presidential memoirs—from Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush (co-authored with Brent Scowcroft), and Bill Clinton—tend to be, even if they are bestsellers, on the dull side. Acknowledging the likelihood of generalization, the narrative edges are smoothed so that "revelations" rarely add much to what is already known. Personal criticisms are muted, except when it comes to the occasional foreign nemesis. The press always takes a pillorying for its failure to understand the true nature of the administration's accomplishments. Congress gets its share of opprobrium, and there is an element of introspection about the shaping of character and the frustrations of failure.
After an interval of years (or decades, in the case of Jimmy Carter's new White House Diary, since his 1982 book Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President), each president releases a book or some other form of historical record that is intended to be a more candid assessment of his White House Years than the memoir. The Reagan Diaries, edited by Douglas G. Brinkley and published in 2008, significantly outsold the official memoirs. Lyndon Johnson's riveting White House tapes (the release of which he knew would come, because they were deposited in his presidential library); George H. W. Bush's All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and other Writings (published in 1999) was engaging, if not especially enthralling; Richard Nixon's extensive interviews with David Frost (for which he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars) were, as the movie Frost/Nixon showed, Nixon's contorted effort at an apology for Watergate. Bill Clinton spent hundreds of hours with Taylor Branch for a book called The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. But the bluntest Clinton insights were his interviews with Ken Gormley for The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, about which I wrote in July....
Of all these presidents, I was privileged to work closely with Jimmy Carter from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s on a number of books, including a memoir of his first run for political office, a collection of poetry, a book called Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, which he co-authored with Rosalynn, and which he has said repeatedly was the most difficult experience of their marriage because of the friction of their differing approach to writing. The last, and for me the most challenging book by far, was called Living Faith, which began as edited versions of the homilies Carter would deliver at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. The purpose of the book was to share the sources of Carter's religious convictions. Carter was convinced that his draft conveyed innermost religious beliefs. I felt that Carter was actually keeping readers at arms' length by using routine scripture disguised as intimacy....
Read entire article at The Atlantic
The modern presidential memoirs—from Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush (co-authored with Brent Scowcroft), and Bill Clinton—tend to be, even if they are bestsellers, on the dull side. Acknowledging the likelihood of generalization, the narrative edges are smoothed so that "revelations" rarely add much to what is already known. Personal criticisms are muted, except when it comes to the occasional foreign nemesis. The press always takes a pillorying for its failure to understand the true nature of the administration's accomplishments. Congress gets its share of opprobrium, and there is an element of introspection about the shaping of character and the frustrations of failure.
After an interval of years (or decades, in the case of Jimmy Carter's new White House Diary, since his 1982 book Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President), each president releases a book or some other form of historical record that is intended to be a more candid assessment of his White House Years than the memoir. The Reagan Diaries, edited by Douglas G. Brinkley and published in 2008, significantly outsold the official memoirs. Lyndon Johnson's riveting White House tapes (the release of which he knew would come, because they were deposited in his presidential library); George H. W. Bush's All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and other Writings (published in 1999) was engaging, if not especially enthralling; Richard Nixon's extensive interviews with David Frost (for which he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars) were, as the movie Frost/Nixon showed, Nixon's contorted effort at an apology for Watergate. Bill Clinton spent hundreds of hours with Taylor Branch for a book called The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. But the bluntest Clinton insights were his interviews with Ken Gormley for The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, about which I wrote in July....
Of all these presidents, I was privileged to work closely with Jimmy Carter from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s on a number of books, including a memoir of his first run for political office, a collection of poetry, a book called Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, which he co-authored with Rosalynn, and which he has said repeatedly was the most difficult experience of their marriage because of the friction of their differing approach to writing. The last, and for me the most challenging book by far, was called Living Faith, which began as edited versions of the homilies Carter would deliver at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. The purpose of the book was to share the sources of Carter's religious convictions. Carter was convinced that his draft conveyed innermost religious beliefs. I felt that Carter was actually keeping readers at arms' length by using routine scripture disguised as intimacy....