Three Writers of Political Autobiographies

The first person singular of the political autobiography takes you past the events described to the person beneath. Or at least the person beneath that those who tell their own stories are willing to let you see. Or at least to those parts of their own story and decisions that they feel they can defend. There are still those stubborn facts, that immovable unchangeable reality the rest of us have been witness to, that provide at least some constraint on what can and cannot be said. Nevertheless, it is their chance to tell their own side of the story in their own way.

What is often the most compelling part is the voice behind the narrative. Although most first-person accounts in the modern age are assisted if not almost entirely ghosted, the real person usually remains visible. We do come closer to knowing who they are. In a genuine first-person account there may be some disguise in the way things are described but ultimately in any reasonably honest account we are certain to hear the persons themselves.

In this review I am looking at three recent political memoirs from the United States: George W. Bush’s Decision Points, Donald Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The first two I will look at directly. The third will be examined through the eyes of the American author Jack Cashill, who has written a book of his own, Deconstructing Obama, in which he discusses who the author of Dreams from My Father actually was. No prizes for guessing who it wasn’t. 

Decision Points  

That Bush’s Decision Points sold more copies in the first months following its release than Bill Clinton’s memoirs have sold up to the present day is surely in large part because of the immediacy of the narrative beyond the mere retailing of fact and opinion. Yet it took me a while to warm to its style and structure. I suppose I have grown up in the tradition of the Henry Kissinger-type memoir, with events embedded inside the grand sweep of history, in which the world unfolds through a logic of its own, and individuals are mere froth on the waters of time. Whatever else I would expect from a Kissinger-style disquisition would not include frequent references to Mrs Kissinger. Well, that is not the way Bush thinks, acts or writes.

Take one example. Bush has just made one of the most momentous decisions of his presidency. It is 2006 and he is about to order the surge in Iraq. His ground commander is General George Casey. And this is what Bush writes: 

Before George deployed to Baghdad, Laura and I invited him and his wife, Sheila, to dinner at the White House. We were joined by Ambassador to Iraq John Negraponte—an experienced and skilled diplomat who had volunteered for the job—and his wife, Diana.  

Did anything get discussed at this dinner? Did this meeting with the wives in attendance lead on to anything that would ultimately have an effect on the conduct of American foreign policy or the way in which the surge would unfold? Did Sheila and Diana contribute to the discussion or to the final outcome? No, not in the least, certainly not according to anything we are told. They have dinner and we find out that General Casey had once been an equipment manager for the Washington Redskins. And then we have a paragraph on what needed doing in Iraq, but not a word relates to the dinner they all shared together that night.

You must not think of this as a criticism. It is just the way Bush goes about things. The more you read the more you realise how important such close personal relationships are. There is an intimacy here in explaining the way we are governed. Even as major world historical events are taking shape, the people behind these decisions sit down with each other at dinner, meet each other’s wives and talk about football.

But what becomes clear is that behind it all there is in George Bush a shrewdness and a keenness of observation that make a difference between success and failure. And the difference is in his being able to make judgments about the competence and ability of others. Bush, to take just one example, describes the process through which he identified David Petraeus as the general to lead the surge. He finishes his observations, and his description of how Petraeus first came to his attention, with this: 

After overseeing training of the Iraqi security forces, General Petraeus was assigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. The premise of counterinsurgency is that basic security is required before political gains can follow. I decided to keep a close eye on General Petraeus’s work—and on him.  

Here we see Bush identify the right personnel, summarise in a single sentence the essence of a successful counterinsurgency operation, implicitly recognise that his own government has made major errors in how it had conducted such operations up until then, and based on this recognition change the policy against the fiercest opposition both inside the White House and out, commencing an operation which eventually led to a success that quite likely could not have occurred in any other way. All very folksy as it is written, but it is also a reminder that the notion that Bush was merely the sum total of the advice he was given is untrue. The Bush administration was run by Bush.

The response to 9/11, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that followed, are naturally the most momentous of the decisions Bush had to make. It is seeing events through the eyes of someone who was at the centre of the decision-making process that makes this such a compelling narrative. If you ever want to cure yourself of the notion that individuals do not matter, that history is driven by circumstances beyond the insignificant role of us individuals, I invite you to consider this from the chapter “Day of Fire” where Bush takes us through his own experience of September 11. He has just been told that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and a third had hit the Pentagon. Of this he writes: 

My thoughts clarified: The first plane could have been an accident. The second was definitely an attack. The third was a declaration of war.

My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass. 

Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor would not have put it quite like that but his thoughts would have run along similar lines. When you read Bush’s words, you have no doubt they are the authentic sentiments, authentically expressed, of the former President of the United States.

The last of the sets of decisions Bush deals with are those that surround the global financial crisis. Even now who can be sure, even within the economics profession, what ought to have been done. We are not talking about the stimulus that came later—which hindsight has clearly shown was a terrible blunder—but about the immediate steps taken right then and there in the heat of the economic meltdown at its worst. Here is how it looked to Bush: 

I was furious the situation had reached this point. A relatively small group of people—many on Wall Street, some not—had gambled that the housing market would keep booming forever. It didn’t. In a normal environment, the free market would render its judgment and they could fail. I would have been happy to let them do so.

But this was not a normal environment. The market had ceased to function. And as Ben had explained [Ben Bernanke, that is; in Decision Points just about everyone goes by their first name], the consequences of inaction would be catastrophic. As unfair as it was to use the American people’s money to prevent a collapse for which they weren’t responsible, it would be even more unfair to do nothing and leave them to suffer the consequences.  

You may argue about Bush’s efforts to stabilise the American economy, but if you had twenty-four hours to work it out, what would you do? In summing it up from the President’s perspective, this is the conclusion he reached: “‘If we’re really looking at another Great Depression,’ I said, ‘you can be damned sure I’m going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover.’”

Bush will never become the sainted FDR, but he will not be remembered as another Herbert Hoover either. Whether his future place in history was the right motivation for the steps he took, or even whether they were the right steps to take, there is no doubt that something had to be done right then with no delay.

Bush’s humour and sense of irony combined with his humanity, seriousness and depth of vision come through on every page. Decision Points is a fascinating and instructive book. It will continue to be read, especially by anyone who wishes to have a sense of what it is like to be making executive decisions, based as such decisions always are on wildly incomplete information, made while a hundred different contradictory opinions are being insisted on by the genuine experts a President is surrounded by, never mind those vested interests who are forever clamouring for the President’s ear, each with an agenda of their own. 

Known and Unknown  

Rumsfeld’s memoir is more in the Kissinger mode, and I say this even though his wife has more entries in the index than anyone else. It is a densely packed account of his life in politics and the decisions he influenced and made. If he had not come up with his “unknown unknowns” remark, it is unlikely he would be remembered even into the 2020s other than by specialists. Instead his insight into the nature of uncertainty will remain in collections of quotations for generations to come. Although ridiculed by the usual suspects when it was first said, it explains with a stunning simplicity the nature of the reality in which every decision must be made.

Known and Unknown is by a Washington insider, which is in many ways its greatest interest. Rumsfeld, having been both a Congressman and then in the cabinets of various administrations, understands with remarkable clarity the decision-making process, and the political environment that surrounds such decisions. If he has ever made a serious mistake I didn’t notice him saying so. But there is no question he understood, certainly by the time he reached the Bush White House, the kinds of reactions that a Republican President’s decision will lead to, especially in a country that has a media megaphone that amplifies the views of the Left.

Bush was a man of good will who expected others, even his Democrat opponents, to work with him in good faith once the election season was over to achieve outcomes for the good of the country. I think he was astonished at the extent to which politics seemed to over-ride every other consideration. The way in which the Obama administration has adopted virtually every war-related decision Bush had made, and the silence and acquiescence of the media and the Left, make plain just how political such things have become. There is no loyal opposition on the Left, only continuous manoeuvring that seems to have no ultimate purpose other than to achieve political power. That the prison at Guantanamo still functions to this day with hardly a murmur of protest is only the most obvious example.

The book is a reservoir of insightful and penetrating observations. An instructive example is his discussion of interrogation techniques during a time of war. The fine parsing of what can be done from a moral perspective, what can be done by members of the defence forces with captured detainees and then, finally, what can be done by skilled interrogators in the CIA, is partly based on an ethical view. But it is just as much framed against the background of what can and cannot withstand public scrutiny when dealing with a media that can potentially keep the slightest misstep as the first item in the nightly news and on the front page of the New York Times for a very long time, when if a Democrat were president you might not hear a word.

But Rumsfeld, as with Bush, and savvy though he is in the ways of Washington, is nevertheless dumbfounded in the end by the sheer weight of idiocy in dealing with those who cannot see what is at stake and who relentlessly hamper decision-making at every turn with no ultimate good in mind other than political advantage. This is a long extract from his chapter on “Law in a Time of War”: 

As never before in history, today lawyers and legal considerations pervade every aspect of US military operations. Besides contending with enemy bullets and bombs, the men and women in our nation’s military and intelligence services must also navigate legal traps set by our enemies, by some of our fellow citizens, by some foreigners, and even by some members of Congress and officials at international institutions such as the United Nations. The rules, regulations and consequences in legal venues have to be and are taken into account on every corner of the battlefield … The mere threat of lawsuits and legal charges effectively bullies American decision makers, alters their actions, intimidates our security forces, and limits our country’s ability to gather intelligence and defend the American people. This is a new kind of asymmetric war waged by our enemies—“lawfare” …

We cannot yet know what the full consequences of lawfare will be, but the trend is troubling. At home, judges—not elected representatives in Congress or in the executive branch—increasingly determine how a president can operate during wartime against our nation’s enemies. Terrorists have been given legal privileges and protections they are not entitled to by any standard. They violate nearly every law of war, yet our courts now perversely award terrorists more rights than any of our traditional enemies have had throughout our country’s history. As a result, whenever and wherever American military personnel capture suspected terrorists, they must assemble evidence and facts to be ready to defend their actions, not only up the military chain of command but in courts of law, in addition to defending themselves in combat.  

 The fury here is easy to understand. What the solution might be, given the fifth column within, Rumsfeld cannot say. Even with all his years in Washington, he is astonished to find his fellow citizens doing all they can to assist some of the most barbaric terrorists on the planet. The book is full of such insight into events, many of which we have only recently lived through, told by someone who has been at the centre. And as the narrative takes us from the days of the Vietnam War through until almost the latest moment, it has an historical interest that continuously rewards the effort. 

Dreams from My Father  

Both Bush and Rumsfeld acknowledge the existence of some form of assistance in writing books that are unmistakably in their own voice. Rumsfeld in his acknowledgments speaks of “the extraordinary team of individuals” he relied on. Bush mentions “help from my researchers”. But no one could doubt that these are their own stories told by themselves in their own way. That this is not the case with the books supposedly authored without assistance by the current American President is a story that for some reason refuses to expand beyond very narrow confines.

There have been two recent controversies about President Obama, one that has attracted a good deal of media attention and one that attracts none at all. The one that has been endlessly discussed is whether Obama was born in the USA. The reason it has been discussed so often is because Obama actually was born in the USA so there is a whiff of oddness about those who say otherwise. It is an issue that can be used to tar the political Right.

But the issue never raised above a whisper is the underground controversy about what is for all practical purposes a certainty, that Barack Obama did not write either of the books for which he is credited as author. And this especially applies to Dreams from My Father, which is the publication that made his name as a literary genius and on which so much of his claim to the presidency originally stood.

The evidence that Dreams from My Father was ghost-written is overwhelming. Since the man himself has not yet admitted in public that he did not write his own book, there is still that smallest element of Cartesian doubt. But given that Michelle Obama has unequivocally stated that she had suggested to Barack, when the book was just a series of tapes, notes and random jottings, that he pack it all up and give the entire bundle to his good friend Bill Ayers to put together, there is not much doubt about what actually happened. This is all reported in a very positive book about the Obamas, Chris Anderson’s Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. There is thus about as much confirmation of this fact as we are going to get or should ever need.

But as it happens, by the time Anderson’s book had been published, Jack Cashill had already worked it out. Cashill is a literary detective; one of his earlier books, Hoodwinked, dealt with cultural and literary fraud.

As Cashill has pointed out, great authors leave a prior trail of great writing. One does not win the US Masters out of nowhere; the same with writing. Anyone who has written something that reaches the heights has previously written something that was almost there but not quite. With Obama there is no such prior trail. His first book has been described as the greatest book ever written by a politician in the United States. Before that, he had written virtually nothing, and certainly absolutely nothing with even a hint of literary merit. And since then, he has made no speech, written no words, made no statement that have been anything other than prosaic in the extreme. His inaugural address was famously uninspiring, listless and dull. Everything he says in public is read from a teleprompter, avoiding all possibility of spontaneity. For all his rhetorical ability to read from a prepared text, he has shown no evident facility with words.

How Cashill worked out that Dreams had been written by Ayers was originally outlined in a series of articles written just before the presidential election in 2008 which were expanded into a fascinating book, Deconstructing Obama. For a description of how he worked it out, it is best to go to his book, but let me quote from a review on www.uncoverage.net which captures how the person who is being written about in the book must have been familiar with the sea in a way the President clearly is not: 

Cashill meticulously compared the writing in Ayers’s books (especially the autobiographical Fugitive Days) with the writing in Dreams. The similarities were too great to pawn off as chance. For instance, one of the greatest similarities, practically leaping up at the reader from the pages of Dreams, was its eerie fixation with nautical terms. This was strange because Obama was singularly untutored in the sea and sailing; all he knew of the ocean was that you surfed in it. Ayers, however, had done a stint as a merchant seaman and Dreams is riddled with the words a sailor would use: fogs, mist, ships, sinking ships, seas, sails, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, floods, shores, storms, streams, wind, waves, waters, anchors, barges, horizons, harbor, bays, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, voyages, etc., and things like wind-whipped, fluttering, sinking, leaking, cascading, swimming, knotted, ragged, tangled, etc. This was the language of a man who’d traveled the ocean and had it in his blood.  

The levels of deceit are astonishing. There is Obama’s straight-out pretence that he had written what he had not. He has made a very large matter of having written every word himself. The book was a large part of the reason Obama became well known in the first place. He is a man with no significant personal accomplishments of any kind other than having written this book. If he did not write the book, he has no apparent qualifications for the office of President—not that writing a book is much of a qualification either.

Then there is the veiled incompetence that sits behind his having been unable to write the book in the first place. Cashill goes to some lengths to describe the contracts with publishing houses that Obama had left unfulfilled. There was serious money available to him if he could complete the book and yet he could not. It is not even that he cannot write well. It seems so far as the crafting of a book is concerned, he cannot write at all. It must make you wonder what those university grades we are never allowed to see would show. There is no evidence in a book written by someone else of that towering intellect Obama is supposed to have, and if it is not evident here, where can it be found?

There is then what may be the most incendiary issue of all, which is that the book was actually put together by Bill Ayers. Ayers was the former leader of the Weatherman terrorist group, as far to the left as it is possible to go. He is famously quoted in an article that appeared on the morning of September 11, 2001, that his only regret is that he had not done more. However mad-Left he is, he is completely unrepentant. The judgment that must follow from Obama having allowed Ayers to write his book is more than just the need to find a ghost writer he could depend on. He also found a comrade on his own side of politics. That the book is very left-wing is so completely apparent that I find it hard to understand how apolitical most people must be not to see it.

But if Ayers put the book together, as Michelle said and Cashill shows, or if he wrote it from cover to cover as Ayers himself has equivocally said more than once, then Obama’s statement during the 2008 election that he barely knew Ayers, that Ayers was “just a guy in the neighbourhood” is an outright untruth. The fact that Obama is and has been a close associate of a radical Marxist during all of his formative years in Chicago, and may even be to this very day, is one of the great political scandals of our time. That the American media will say nothing about the authorship of Obama’s books, nor about his friendship with Ayers, may be a greater scandal still.

Dr Steven Kates teaches economics at RMIT University in Melbourne. His book Free Market Economics: An Introduction for the General Reader was recently published by Edward Elgar.