Best Political Nonfiction Books

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

I wrote last week about Chris Cillizza's poll of Washington political junkies, and how their rankings of American political fiction were so way, way wrong.

Now, it's on to the non-fiction category, where the Fix fans did a little better, as one might expect of readers of The Washington Post. Yet there are glaring omissions--most notably the work of Post stars Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and David Maraniss.

How does any list of significant books on contemporary politics not include All the President's Men, or The Final Days or The Brethren and other Woodward books, or Maraniss's biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, or his collaboration with Michael Weiskopf on that little classic, Tell Newt to Shut Up!

I call it the Woodward School, though the New Yorker's Elizabeth Drew gave us more high falutin' versions for many years, and probably ranks as a co-founder of the academy.

The latest entry, secure atop the best-selling lists, is Game Change, a guilty pleasure from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, about the 2008 campaign.

Like 'em or not, and I do, these are more than just confections. With the advent of special prosecutors, and e-mail, and the death of diaries, the tell-alls that Woodward and his imitators churn out will be invaluable to future historians--most especially Woodward's research, the transcripts of his interviews, and other papers, when opened to scholars at the University of Texas. Here, truly, is the first draft of political history. Our descendents will know Woodward's name from the footnotes. But he doesn't make the Fix list!

Turning to what did get rated, Cillizza does right placing What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer, a masterly piece of reporting on the 1988 campaign, atop his list of personal favorites.

And Fix readers show equally sturdy judgment by praising Robert Caro's body of work--his biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and his ongoing multi-volume story of the life of Lyndon Johnson, which began with The Path to Power and is yet to be completed. As a body of work, it is stunning.

Campaign narratives are not the same species as political biographies, and I would not attempt to choose between the work of these two authors. Both Cramer and Caro are personal favorites, and very gracious, hard-working and talented men. I would pay big bucks to get the two of them at a table, just to listen to the conversation. (Any editors out there want to bankroll me to try?)

There are a few inane choices on the Fix list, like Hardball by Chris Matthews. But the standards of the genres, for the most part, get recognized. Teddy White is on the list, though he seems to have slipped a bit in public regard, which is a mistake: any re-reading of his Making of the President series shows the debt that all who follow on the campaign trail owe to White's pioneering reportage. Poor Hunter S. Thompson was indeed our gonzo genius. The Selling of the President by Joe McGinnis was original and important and, deservedly, still taught on campuses today.

But where is that forgotten masterpiece, An American Melodrama the tale of the 1968 presidential campaign by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page? OrModern Times, that very influential book by conservative author Paul Johnson?

And can any respectable list not include Norman Mailer's dazzling writing on J.F.K., the anti-war movement, and the 1968 political conventions? It is in a class by itself.

Truman, by David McCullough is deservedly on the list, as is Lou Cannon's biography of Ronald Reagan, and Huey Long by T. Harry Williams, which is a triumph of scholarship.

But what about Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (find a better prologue and I'll pay you twenty bucks) or Arthur Schlesinger's staggering accomplishment--the essential trilogy on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal? Or David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear, that comprehensive account of the Depression and World War II? These are glaring omissions.

Peggy Noonan's What I Saw at the Revolution is a lovely book by a lovely lass about being "staff" in Washington, and it's required reading for anyone who thinks they want to work for a politician. It's on the Fix list--but not the one indispensable book from the Reagan era, The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman. Another inexplicable omission.

Also neglected is that charming (really!) autobiography, Right from the Beginning, by Pat Buchanan. And where is Richard Nixon's thousand-plus pages on his life, the most revealing of presidential autobiographies? Or Henry Kissinger's elaborate self-justifications? Or Kevin Phillips's seminal The Emerging Republican Majority, a model for countless subsequent books on voting behavior, and a key to understanding the rise of Nixon, Reagan and Gingrich--and how the Republicans have gotten themselves boxed in down South.

I know a little about writing about Congress, and Tip O'Neill's (only somewhat fictional) memoir, Man of the House, is a joy. So is John Barry's book on the Jim Wright era, The Ambition and the Power, and Hedrick Smith's The Power Game They all got nods. But you cannot understand Capitol Hill without reading Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft on campaign financing. And the best book on Watergate (and on Tip, I'll say, with no false modesty) is by Jimmy Breslin: How the Good Guys Finally Won. A fine spring rain of a man, both of them.

Do you want to know how legislation gets made? Read Showdown at Gucci Gulch, by Alan Murray and Jeffrey Birnbaum, on the battle over tax reform. It somehow missed the list. Why do congressional leaders matter? Try A Rage for Justice, by John Jacobs, the story of Phil Burton, which will also give you a lesson on California politics. As will Water and Power, by William Kahrl, the study on how Los Angeles, with the help of Teddy Roosevelt, stole the water it needed to become a great city - the tale told stylishly in the movie Chinatown.

RFK: A Memoir, by Jack Newfield, remains my favorite of all the books on the Kennedys, and it is nice to see it retains an audience. But Doris Kearns Goodwin helped cast the Kennedy myth with the awesome The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Nigel Hamilton pierced it with JFK: Reckless Youth. Both deserve to be ranked, and are not. And what about Jack Beatty's The Rascal King, a biography of James Michael Curley? How did that miss out?

For the dabblers or the neophytes, Beatty's collection Pols is a glittering compendium that includes work by Caro and McCullough and Cramer, C. Vann Woodward and Henry Mencken and other giants of the craft. And the ogre I work for, Robert Schlesinger, has a nice little volume on presidential speechwriters, by the way. It's called White House Ghosts. He promised to give me a day off in June, 2011 if I said that.

And finally, as one who is laboring amid the detritus of the late 19th century these days, it was a pleasant surprise to see the forgotten Matthew Josephson make the Fix list. The Politicos is terrific, with rich anecdotes and analysis, and required reading for anyone trying to make sense of those years in our history between the Civil War, and World War I.

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